Soapier and Wikileaks

Hi all,

In light of the recent development between Amazon and Wikileaks, we've decided to take down our products from Amazon.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "You had products on Amazon?"

Yes. Yes we did.

Amazon was, by far, the biggest headache of our company. Or, I should say, for me, personally. Setting up the products was a big problem. We don't have UPC codes, so we had to hack our way in, with the help of the Amazon team. It only took six emails to them, and then finally said 'oh, yeah, you're quoting our policy, we'll take care of it. No need for UPC codes on beauty products'. Sigh.

Then, I went through the arduous task of putting up our products. It took no less than five minutes per product, to list them on their site. The first round, I did it over the course of four hours, only to find out I'd made a mistake. Had to go into each of our 50 products, fix the mistake.

Then, we waited. And waited. And waited.

And when we got our first order, well, it was exciting. For all of two minutes.

The first order was for four bars of soap. Pretty cool.

The thing is, Amazon charges a flat shipping rate, per product, for products they do not fulfill. That means, our customers were being charged $4.99 for each product they purchased, of ours. So that 4 bar order turned into a $44 order, instead of a $29.95 order.

We refunded the shipping difference, but we found that we weren't getting any orders, and now we could understand why. The shipping charges were turning people off.

We tried to get Amazon to fix it, but that's another policy.

So, over the course of 1 year, we received 21 sales, and with each one, had to refund shipping charges.

We don't want to take advantage of some policy, just to make a couple of extra dollars. Shipping already costs an arm and a leg.

Don't get us started on the commission amount that Amazon was making per order. It was high. Almost 45%. This made us raise our prices to $6.95 on Amazon.

We kept it going because it was just another outlet for us, and we didn't have to do much self promotions on their site.

So, after the recent news about Amazon and Wikileaks, we've decided to sever our ties with Amazon. No great loss to us, surely no great loss to Amazon, but we felt it was important, especially since we donated money to Wikileaks earlier this year.

You know what was awesome? Julian Assange actually replied to some emails I sent him. His replies were campy and fun. Here's my first email to them:

Hi Daniel,

Well, February came and went and I wanted to let you know that we sold 102 bars of soap for Wikileaks, for a grand total of $250, to be donated to this great website.

Truth be told, I was kind of hoping for more... Blah! But, I hope the money helps, and I think this will become an annual thing for Soapier and Wikileaks. February will be Wikileaks month at Soapier!

Julian's reply:

It's great. I suspect soapy types are not too aggressive but WL is inherently combative... "All your files belong to us is" fantastic, but perhaps "Scrubbing corruption away one file at a time" and similar might work better for women, who I assume buy these products...

I followed it up about four months later, after the Collateral Murder video was posted:

I just wanted to let you know that the video you posted was simply unreal, and I'm so glad that Wikileaks is around to continue the fight for more transparency within the world's governments.

It's quite unreal, the lengths the Pentagon went through, saying that Wikileaks was a threat to national security, and all of the harassment that followed. I'm so sorry you all had to go through that. I hope you're coming out the other side, and in good condition.

I wish you all the best of luck, and continued support throughout the world.

His reply:

thanks. we'll scrub our troubles away for sure.

We'll see what we can do with some of these other companies that are going out of their way to put on a good face, but the fact is that using our wallets to express our distaste seems to be the only way to get things done, any more.

I downloaded the Insurance file that Wikileaks uploaded. We'll see what happens when Assange gets out of jail.