Waitlist: You are in line in case the item you wants becomes available.

The order of this waitlist is determined by when your claim/comment is registered by the system.

This does not guarentee you an item.

You will get a notification/email/message if the item becomes available.

After it comes into your cart. You will have 8 hours to check out or it will go to the next person.

The following short video covers the following:

• difference between waitlist and preauthorization
• why preauthorizations work
• how to preauthorize an item on a browser and the app.

You can watch the video here.

Preorder: This is an item on sale that has a later ship date.

These are normally only done through our website erinlanebags.com and are RARELY on a live sale.

Hankmas is considered a preorder and is done live. You can see our preorder policies here.

You can shop a live sale either on a social platform like Facebook or Instagram, or on our free App.

It is personal preference, and we will always broadcast to both socials and the app.

You can download our app on either Apple or Android here.

Registering is not required as you can checkout as a guest. However, if you do you won't earn rewards! (and we don't want that.)

On a browser:
Go to erinlanebags.com and click the account button in the upper right hand corner. If you have an account on our website already, you are set. If not, you can create one here!

On the App:
On the bottom bar, you can find the account icon (the little person) and log in or create an account here. This log in is the same as the website log in, so you can use this both places.

You don't have to register. You can check out as a guest if you want to. However, if you want to earn rewards (floofbahs) then you need to have an account.

On a browser: You would type the word "sold" and then the number (101, 205, etc) that appears on your screen over my head.

On the app: you would click the little photo in the upper right hand corner that says "Buy".

Then something pops up from the bottom of your screen. You would then click "Add to Cart."

That means you are in line in case someone who has the item decides to pass on it.

The order of the waitlist is determined by the live selling program and is based on when your comment/claim was registered to the server. (This is down to the hundredth of a second sometimes.)

If the item becomes available, you will receive an email/notification/message and have 8 hours to decide if you want the item or if you want to pass.

After that 8 hour timer runs out, the item will automatically move to the next person on the waitlist.

ABSOLUTELY!

After the live sale is over you can shop the items from the live in the Rewynd Replay in the app!

You can also rewatch it on Facebook.

On Facebook: You will have to watch the live (you can skip around if you want) and comment for the item the same way you would if we were still live (sold + #).

In the app: Just open your app and you can click the live replay at the top of your screen.

Once in the replay, click coat hanger icon on the side of your screen.

Here you can see everything we had on the live. You can add to cart or to your waitlist. And by clicking on the item, it will jump to that part of the live, so you can see the full bag!

You sure can! If you are logged in, on the home screen, the bottom bar has a rewards icon. Click that and you will see your rewards available!

You just click redeem and you can grab your code, come back to checkout and enter it for your discount!

We do ask that no coupons are used during Hankmas. It is fine to use them all other times, but that is the one event a year we ask you to not use a coupon.

If you are having issues with a coupon code, please feel free to contact us. We will need the coupon code to look it up.

We have an awesome rewards program here! It's our way of saying thank you for your choice to support a small handmade business.

To earn rewards you need to go and create an account here at erinlanebags.com by clicking the little, green present at the bottom right of the screen. Click log in (if you have an account here already) or click create account and follow the prompts.

It's that easy. Once you have an account, all purchases made tied to that email address will earn rewards.

PLEASE NOTE: If the email address you use on erinlanebags.com and the one tied to your Facebook account are NOT THE SAME ADDRESS, you might have two rewards accounts.

If you have two accounts on the website, we can combine them. We just need to know both email addresses that you have accounts under and which email address you WANT TO KEEP.

If you have any questions about possibly having two accounts or not receiving rewards, please feel free to contact us.

Each item you cart has its own timer.

If you add something at 8:30 and something else at 10:14, they will expire at different times.

So you have 18 hours on EACH ITEM.

The 18 hour timer only applies to items that were claimed/carted NOT FROM A WAITLIST.

If you have an item come off the waitlist into your cart, you have 18 hours to decide if you want the item or not.

If you check out, the item is yours. If you do not check out in that amount of time, then the item expires and moves to the next person in line.

Once a waitlist item has exited your cart, we cannot do anything to give you another chance at it. Unless everyone else passes, and the item goes back "in stock."

Technically, yes you can.

But we do live sales to keep everything as fair as possible for everyone. So we have a policy that if you are shopping the app before the live and check out with items reserved for the live, we will issue you a full refund and those items will be released to the people on the waitlists. Think of it as shopping the list early if I forgot to turn it off when we had CommentSold.

This is not a policy we want to have, but unfortunately it is a limitation of the program we use. Therefore, we will have to enforce it if it becomes an issue.

If you do this repeatedly, we reserve the right to block your ability to participate in live sales for a period of time.

ABSOLUTELY NOT! I have never sold out a live sale. Though I would super love that. It has literally never happened.

Here's the truth, at the end of the actual live, where I sign off, yes, it looks like everything is claimed.

By the time I get home about 30 minutes later, there are items that have no waitlists and are ready for purchase right away.

Waitlists work. But we always end up with a significant number of items that are on the website about a week after the live event.

I know that it can be frustrating to be on a waitlist. However, if this was a website update, there is no cart hold, meaning someone could just cart jack you and the same problem occurs, but with no hope of being notified if the item becomes available. This is one of the main reasons we do live sales.

Please note that there are loads of times when something with 50+ people on a waitlist just ends up sitting on the website. Does that always happen, no. But it does happen more than you think.

We have listened to our customers, and that is why we have changed our waitlist time to 8 hours. People were "cart camping" where they would have tons of things in their carts and you would think they were sold out.

They weren't someone just didn't release them in a timely manner.

To combat this, we are moving waitlist times to 8 hours.

We wait for movement on waitlists to slow down and then we combine all the orders going to the same person and ship them out!

This normally takes about a week. So we begin packing the Friday after a live event, and in most cases the packages are picked up on the following Monday from our studio.

I wish I had a crystal ball that could tell me what that was going to be!

Truth is we don't always know what will be a break out hit fabric wise or which bag will be the most popular that live or that season.

While I am a pretty good guesser, there is no formula for what will be the thing everyone rushes to.

I guess wrong a lot, so I just have to do my best and make more of what I *think* will be the most popular.

I have done this several times with very little success.

It seems that when a live sale ends, that is the last most people think of it. And by the time I get more fabric and make up the item, people just pass and I am left with a bunch of inventory that no one really wants.

In the world of yarn, so many people use this model to great success.

However, when dealing with fabric and not yarn, things get a little different.

For a yarn dyer, they know they have X number of skeins. That means they can dye any color on those skeins.

That's not how fabric works, much to my chagrin. Because 100 yards of fabric could be 100 one yard fabrics or any combination of fabric prints to that 100 yards.

We design every fabric you see in our shop (with a few limited exceptions). That means we have to have our fabric printed. The lead time on getting custom fabric printed and delivered is on average 30 days. (But a few times it has taken more like 45.)

So if we do a preorder, you have ordered and paid for product that I then have to order fabric for, and wait for it to come in and then process into bags. That process is at least another 30+ days. Most people do not like waiting 60+ days for their bags or really any preorder.

If I buy the fabric and then offer the items for preorder, there is an inventory issue. I still have to decide in this case how many of each thing to make so that I don't run out of fabric.

And then what happens if I guess wrong? What if I allotted for too many project bags and not enough totes? I can't just say, "Well, I will move this fabric from product A to product B. No big deal." Because the reality is that no two products are the same length requirement to do that. Every product is it's own unique snowflake of fabric needs.

(File that under things I wish I knew when I started.)

So that leaves me with having to make the decision on how many of each thing to make no matter what. And it is easier on the customer side to say, "I like that" and have it shipped out quickly than it is to wait.

So, if I already have to decide how many of each product to make, I might as well make it up and take the waiting out of the equation for you.

We love the idea of a shorter live sale; however, that would mean we have less time to make items up.

Production sewing is an assembly line. I might set zippers on 5 different products for two days, and then move those items into next steps, but setting all the zippers at once, is the best way to do that.

The only way to make the number of things we produce is to sew this way, and that means we generally end up with everything getting finished in just a matter of two to three days of each other, so that means one long live sale at the end of the month.

That is totally fine. We know that this way of shopping isn't for everyone. This is just what we have found is best for our business.

That said, items from every live sale are posted to our website and our new app.

After we get everything shipped out after the live event, we post all the items in a collection on our website. So you don't have to shop live, have an app, or do anything other than browse at your convenience.

Obviously, some items sell out and are not available on the website after a live, but that does not mean that there is nothing left. We have LOTS of bags from LOTS of live sales hanging out on the website all the time.

As much as we loved CommentSold, Shopify (our website provider) and CommentSold broke up.

Basically, one or both companies decided they couldn't agree on how payments should be processed, so they decided to part ways.

As much as we hate to see CommentSold go, we are in love with our new app and think it will offer a more streamlined and better shopping experience.

Other than the look, live shopping will be very much the same.

The new app is built withing the Shopify framework, meaning that there is only one platform. That makes a lot of things easier straight out of the gate.

The notifications should be more personalized for you and your cart as well as your rewards points (floofbahs).

The two things that we no longer can offer as they go against the terms of service with Shopify is the preauthorization feature (which is super sad) and the free shipping window.

However, the free shipping window will actually probably end up better as now products sold to you will ship based on weight and you can choose your shipping service provider (USPS, UPS).

This is the thing I lament the most. Preauthorizations are against the terms of service for Shopify.

There will never be a preauthorization feature on this platform, and we have no way to control that.

That was a, I am assuming, a deal that CommentSold brokered with their credit card processing provider to assume some amount of risk with that preauthorization.

Shopify does not, and I am told, will not offer that feature ever.

We do offer free shipping on orders over $300.

The free shipping window was also a CommentSold feature.

I have asked the app developers if there is a way to do this, and they have told me there isn't.

However, the way shipping is processed now is based on your packages weight. That means you are only paying for how much it will weigh for your product to arrive to you. You can also choose your carrier and speed it is delivered. So that gives you more choice and will hopefully save you money.

I had to average the cost to ship things to the farthest point from my studio, meaning if you live 30 miles away, you were paying for it to be able to go 400 miles away.