Silk Road forums
Market => Rumor mill => Topic started by: Pharmville on October 23, 2011, 02:15 am
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Hello Everyone,
Prologue: wow, that was some strange trip, huh? How long was SR marketplace down anyway? We didn't keep very close track because we had already put ourselves on "vacation" before it happened, but that was a long one and I hope it doesn't happen again and I also hope that SR is going to put a PGP signed explanation of what did happen so we all know and there's not a lot of guessing and shenanigans about it. :)
First, let me apologize for causing any concern and/or mixups when I took down our listings four days ago. I thought that when a vendor put that they were "on vacation" it just said "this vendor has no active listings" and that was that. Apparently not and this led to a lot of speculation and rumors. The truth of the matter was that I got up an went to work at 5:30am on Monday, saw the bitcoin was in (another!) of its devaluation nosedives and I realized that any orders we took while this was occurring we would automatically lose money on even before we shipped them so it seemed ridiculous to take orders knowing we'd lose money on them so I talked it over with Ben and we decided that we'd worked pretty hard these last couple of months and that we had had that horrible situation with our #1 roxi supplier and we'd needed to start beta testing OTHER roxi suppliers and Ben is in the middle of a major redesign of all our pakaging both outside and labels and also for some of the products themselves inside the packages and we're about to introduce a bunch of new items and then one of our buyers, Yolkling 57, sent me a pm telling me that we were the #1 vendor and the funniest thing happened: instead of being overjoyed the way I usually was whenever our ranking went up in the Pharmville vendor ranking list...well, for the very first time I thought "I just want to quit". And I talked to Ben about this because it was such a serious issue and I found out that when I told him that we were #1 he was thinking the same thing "why don't we just quit this all together?"
Now you may ask yourself, and rightly so, why on Earth would the person(s) who had just in two short months climbed from from #167 to#1 want to stop doing business. And the answer was simple: we were busting our butts every day, 7 days a week, to bring the best products we could to everyone here at the best prices possible and at the end of the day when we added everything up, there was no profit. And I don't mean just in the colloquial sense of "hey, we only made 4% on that sale, that's no profit". I mean that we had shipped a huge number of orders and done a good job and all the customers had sent in extremely nice feedbacks about us that made us feel like they appreciated all the hard work that went into getting their shipments to them but the fact of the matter was: there was no money. And then to top it all off, the very next day the bitcoin dropped some more and we happened to have some in our account because we had shipped some very large orders the previous two days and I hadn't had time to go over and get them sold so we lost about $3500.
So in the final analysis we shipped 500+ orders with a 99% positive response rate to our products and service, did such a good job that we made it all the way to #1, I figured I'd worked about 950 hours and Ben had worked a little over 600 hours and what we had to show for it was a net loss of $3500. I have to admit, that was depressing. So, being that I've been a (legitimate) business owner for the last approximately 30 years, I set out to find out why this had happened. And it turned out to be one very simple thing: the bitcoin. We had priced our products correctly, we had covered our shipping costs, we had purchased our products at the right prices, and we had controlled all the other costs associated with making and servicing the shipments. It was simply that we hadn't been able to get our bitcoins collected through escrow fast enough and then sold fast enough to ensure our profit. Between the escrow lag and the rapidity with which the bitcoin would tumble on those 4 or 5 occasions over the last two months that it did so, it had wiped us out.
So, that in a nutshell is why I decided on Monday morning to pull all our listings and take a few days off to work on the other aspects of our business and get everything ready for our Grand Reopening. I am pleased to tell you that with the exception of one item (Opana), every item was in stock and ready to ship when I put our listings back up at about 6am this morning. The only problem is that Silk Road very quickly went offline after that and after that it was just simply nowhere to be found. NOTE: when you go on vacation you lose your place in the vendor rankings so this morning when I put us back up we were #211 out of 211 SR vendors...which strangely enough felt more realistic for a company that had lost $3500 on all that business. :)
So...what do you think happens now? Do Ben and Alex slip off quietly into the night cursing under their breath about all the time they wasted shipping to all the g-damn customers who abused them left, right and sideways every time they didn't have enough roxis in stock to fill their order? Or do Alex & Ben tell everyone that it was good while it lasted but those super cheap prices on the valium, xanax and perc5/325's are going to have to go up 25% because they're 40% below all the competitors and so they'll still save 15% by buying from us instead of buying from our competitors? Or do Alex and Ben make up some silly excuse about how the vendors have all raised the prices so much that we're going to have to raise all the prices when, in fact, that's not true (except in one temporary case). Or do we just bitch and moan about SR's fees and the way the hedging used to be so the buyer got protected but the seller didn't and blah blah blah.
NO, we're not going to do any of that...
We've decided we're going to launch Pharmville 2.0 !! :D
After being here for a couple of months we've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. No, I don't mean you Nomad. ;) And we have a few thoughts on those things and then a few announcements about Pharmville 2.0
The thoughts are that the GOOD things about Silk Road and it's forum are that generally people are civil, in fact way more civil than at any other forum we've ever been a member of. Even with the occasional catfight. ;) There are LOTS of buyers, the last time I looked we had someone buy whose user number was around 76,284 so there are one huge bunch of people looking at and buying at the Silk Road. And more people are finally reading the forum. The number of registered forum users is growing very fast now, even though it's still pitifully low. We just have to find a way to get the majority of the users to read the forum! There would be so many fewer problems and scammers would get away with so much less if everyone just read the forum.
The only really BAD thing that we can think of about Silk Road is that there are still way too many scammers, on both the buying and the selling side, getting away with way too many shenanigans and outright theft and fraud. Ben and I find it especially disheartening when a new buyer comes to us with questions about placing an order and they tell us that they've already had one or two orders but both times they got ripped off and now they're afraid to place an order even though they've read our feedbacks and we seem to be very honest people.
We are a *community* of people who like to take recreational substances. We're adults and we have the right to do so. There's no reason for people to come to this site to commit theft, robbery and fraud and we, as a community with SR as our leader, simply must find a way to stop it. It's gone on far too long and in far too many instances...it's time to kill off the scammers and make it intolerable for them to try and exist here at our happy little home.
OK, those are our thoughts. Here's the improvements/changes/etc that are coming along with the opening of Pharmville 2.0:
1. Value selection-from now on every time we source a new product I am going to do my best to source a similar product that sells at a much lower price; approximately half of what the normal market price is for the "premiere" product. Take the case of the roxi 30mg. The change in the FL pain clinic laws last year forced the wholesale cost up approximately 40% and it doesn't look like it's ever going to come down again. The roxi is our best selling item and that should be obvious to everyone. So, we are now going to carry the MS Contin in 30mg and 60mg sizes at $12.50 and $25.00 respectively. That means that if you're willing to lick off the coating and rub it dry you're going to have yourself a nice little pure 30mg morphine pill...for just slightly less than half the price of a roxi 30mg.
We are already carrying Xanax 2mg, Valium 10mg and Percocet 5/325's in small retail packs that are 40% below the other SR retailers. In large packs, such as the 50 pack or 100 pack, the prices are so low they are ridiculous! I am planning to carry this strategy out to every new category of items we offerl In the coming weeks and months that will include stimulants, very high quality MDMA (84% pure, all shards, no powder), methamphetamine powder (60% pure), and some very special items that will only be revealed as they arrive. :D
Whether you have all the money in the world to buy product OR whether you are on a very tight budget, Pharmville understands your circumstances and wants to do business with you. We will always treat the smallest $40 order the same as a $2,000 order. Every customer is important, every shipment receives the same loving care and every person should go away after buying from Pharmville thinking "those guys really cared about me and my shipment". If you DON'T feel that way after buying from us,I want you to pm me and I will *promptly* get back with you and see what we can do to make it right!
2. A warning about Opana-Opana is a very fun pill. It is extremely strong and it gets you very high. It is also very expensive. It also has the quickest tolerance curve of any drug I have ever known about or ever tried. Once we were out of roxis so I decided to snort an Opana. I never snort anything, but I divided it into 1/8ths and I snorted those little piles all day long and it took care of me for about 18 hours...and I was pretty high all 18 of those hours. :) But we didn't get our roxis the next day either so I did Opana again. Can you guess the end of this story? By day 7 I was snorting 6 Opana per day and I was barely getting high at all. And the withdrawals? With roxis I can go about 24 hours since the last one I chew up and then I start to get flu-like symptoms, etc. With Opana, after 6-8 hours I was feeling like a dog that got run over by a pick-up truck. I looked like one too! :) The reason I mention this here is we like to sell drugs to people to have fun and recreation. We don't want to ruin people's lives or their pocketbooks...again, why we are working hard to offer a complete Value Selection. So, Opana users: my suggestion as someone who has been around this game for 15+ years is: save the Opana for the big party night, just once or twice a week. For everyday use stick to roxis or MS Contin. If you get on the Opana daily train, soon you will find yourself with a habit you don't want and can't afford. Ok, end of lecture. :)
3. New cut-off time-because we have become the #1 vendor at Pharmville and because Pharmville attracts a lot of attention from LE we have had to respond by instituting a whole new set of security procedures and one of them requires that we move up our cut-off time for same day shipment to 7:00am. So you can stay up all night if you like and peruse all the goodies but when the time comes to place the order you need to make sure you get it in before 7:00am EST. This is not going to be negotiable either. I can't explain in any detail because to do so would totally defeat the purpose and LE would get a lot of information without even having to work for it. Suffice it to say we are here, we are here to stay, we are working very hard to institute and maintain extremely sophisticated and yet workable security so that we can still work at a pace that is fast enough to get out the wonderful, huge piles of orders you lovely buyers send us. And one of the aspects of this method of extremely heightened security is that you have to get a very right and early start on the day.
Now this does not mean I and Ben have suddenly lost our empathy/sympathy for the person who is a daily roxi user and if you are one of those people and you have been a good supporter of Pharmville and you are truly in a jam and are going to face being sick, like green in the gills sick, if you don't get some roxis overnighted to you it doesn't mean that we won't on very very rare occasions make an exception and make an extra run and get them to you because I (Ben only smokes weed, he doesn't ever take pills) KNOW how that feels and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy BUT those exceptions are going to be very few and very far between and they will only be done for people who have been loyal Pharmville customers. So, please, for your own sake and so that we can keep our security tight and therefore make sure we will be around tomorrow to offer you the same excellent service that we have from Day One up to today, plan ahead and get your orders in the night before. We don't care if it's 3am or 6:58 am, just have it in by 7:00am. Thank you! :)
4. What to do when there's no way to reach us through Silk Road-the first and always preferable way is to reach us at TorPM. But as we saw over the last few days, when the server itself is compromised or attacked or whatever, sometimes TorPM is also unavailable. So, we have set up two additional secure places to reach us that we will be checking several times a day during Silk Road outages: one is Countermail and our name is Pharmville@Countermail.com, the second is Safe-mail and our name is Pharmville@safe-mail.net and soon we will have an account set up at TorMail but when computer genius me tried to do it myself I blew it and it doesn't work yet, but we intend to get it working this week just like we intend to finally get the PGP problem fixed and have it working before the end of the weekend. Our original tech guy has apparently flown the coop for good so we've hired a new, very nice and very proficient tech guy to hep us here with all things technical and one of them is to get our TorMail account working tomorrow.
5. We have a suggestion that we'd like the entire Silk Road community to get behind and present to Silk Road Admin as something very important and needed for the sellers. The buyers would benefit from it too but it would be of immeasurable help to the sellers and that is: let us see what the bitcoin rate was when the order was placed. If there is some way to do this now, then I'm an idiot and I just can't read properly but I don't think there is, so this is Ben and my official request that Silk Road Admin add a line to the order details that tells the sellers what rate was being used to calculate the order when it was placed. It doesn't seem like something that would require an awful lot of computer coding time and we believe it would be very helpful to the sellers as they view their open orders.
6. Old school becomes new school-I've had access for a long time to suppliers in different countries where the Purdue Pharma company, in their infinite wisdom never did change over to the new OP formulation. So we've decided to bring back the old OC-40's and OC-80's because they really are great old items and the prices will be fixed and non-negotiable because the cantankerous old bastards that can get their hands on them for me just refused to give me any kind of discounts whatsoever no matter how damn many I buy. So the 40mg will be $30 and the 80mg will be $60. We hope that some of you will like having thees "old reliables" back as a choice when you want to maybe hit a different set of receptors in your brain than the ones you're usually hitting on a daily basis.
7. New Product Interest-I have been approached now by 5 different high volume buyers who want to buy Clonazepam and Modafinil from us. I am seriously considering adding both of them to the line but before I make a final decision I would like to hear from you, our loyal Pharmville folks and see if you have any interest whatsoever or do I happen to be talking to the only five people on Silk Road who want to buy these items. Just looking for a general idea of the kinds of quantities, frequency, and pricing that would make everyone smile and be happy about buying these items. So, if you're interested, leave a reply here or hit me up with a pm so I can make a correct decision about carrying these two items. And I want to do it soon, so the sooner you reply, the better! :)
8. THE BOTTLES ARE BACK!!!-and at a new lower price point. Now the packaging that is so killer cool that I can't even begin to describe it nor would I want to to give LE an idea of what they should be looking for is still going to take another 4-7 days to institute, so, for the meantime, we are simply opening up the current bottles and making sure that everyone has 11ml of 100mg/ml solution it it and they are now priced at $100 so that means you're getting 1.1grams of our lovely Bio-Ket ketamine for a flat $100. It also comes with a "no fucking around" guarantee that says if you dry it out you are guaranteed to get one full gram of dried K. We have reached a settlement with the supplier and we are going to be doing our own sourcing on this item for the future but part of the settlement is helping the supplier in a big way to get rid of the 500 bottles that he's got in stock that are all unevenly filled and such. But just be assured: the one you receive from Pharmville is going to have 11ml of solution in it and a guaranteed minimum of 1 gram dried. :)
9. Dry ketamine powder-due to the overwhelming response we are going to continue to carry this item as well in 0.5gram and 1gram baggies. So order all you want, we'll dry it out for you and get it shipped! :)
10. The new MS Contin 30mg ARE HERE AND SALE PRICED-as promised, the first 50 people to purchase this item are going to get it for a price of $10.00. After that the price will be $12.50 and don't fret, if people go crazy and buy them all up on this first day, there's another way bigger shipment backing this one up that's coming in a week and it will have the MS Contin 60mg on it as well. And from this point forward we intend to carry both of these in big quantities as an alternative to what we think it getting to be a very overpriced roxi 30mg, but we'll be carrying it too just for those people who won't stand for anything else. :)
Ok, so that's about it. We're here, we're fully stocked on every item including some new ones and we're ready to go. We're taking orders now but be sure to have them in by the time you go to bed on Sunday if you want them shipped on Monday! We are totally committed to the Silk Road and we're going to do everything we an to make it the best supplied, best priced, and friendliest experience you ever had buying recreational substances. :)
***The Pharmville Gang, Ben & Alex***
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Dam.....You GUYS ARE INCREDIBLE. That was like reading a mission statement from a SUPER cool pharmacist or something.
Kudos to you both Ben & Alex. Sorry to hear about your loss after such hard work.....glad to see you raising the ante instead of folding. I hope the bitcoin volatility improves for us all.
and scammers will rot in hell someday.
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great to see you back, sucks you lost your #1 rank you worked so hard for.
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Glad to see you back!
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Wow, this is a profesh seller. Good work, dude.
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um, fuck yeah. you guys are better than walmart! ;)
and i'm really glad the ketamine thing got sorted out finally. what a roller coaster!
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Can you please tell me more about the coming MDMA? I'll tell you right now if it's legit (which I don't doubt that it will be) and you're competitively priced, being that you're sending from the US you will make a killing.
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Hell YEAH!!! Glad ya'll made it back, I was pullin' for ya! You both are an inspiration to myself and many others here and IRL Im quite sure. I really love the thought you put into your business, it really reflects the professional businessmen that you are. All I have to say is damn you guys are awesome.
Welcome back and yeh I feel ya on the working like a dog 7 days a week!
Paperchasing
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This is the mentality I strive for daily here.
And have thought about these passed couple weeks, sick.
I've know your plan since before.
And I knew it was like mine.
So last night I PM SR to let me choose about 4-5 moderators to add to forums.
This should cut out scams, threats and those against us.
Pharmville you know it's not as much fun being #1 as climbing to #1. :P
nomad
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That would be a good idea NB. This place kinda fell apart when you guys weren't around as much and I know its alot to stay up on everything.