I would like to say I am a master of focus, but even taking time out to write this is redirecting my attention away from more than a few things I need to be doing. But, most of my current thought are revolving around how I can improve my efforts with my store…
Firstly, I would like to say I appreciate a really well laid out page of typography and I try to do that…lol…
I think I’ve talked about this in other posts, but I ‘fell into’ opening my own store, at this point, a little over a year ago. I’ve been doing design work for over 25 years and was confident (overly?) that the stuff I had done, and was sitting in files doing nothing at all on my hard drive would have some commercial appeal and if I just got them out there SOMEONE would be interested.
You’re on the internet, you see what’s for sale, there’s a niche, an audience, for everything. With that said I have made a handful of sales and not enough to cover the cost of the Shopify store I pay for monthly.
Part of me wants to throw in the towel. To give up. To cease and desist!…lol…
The other part, possibly half, maybe less, is telling me I’m just doing something wrong…or not right…
I started this journey by finding sites like Curioos and Redbubble where you can just upload your designs and hope someone finds them. I was in heaven, uploading like a wild man and watching my designs splash all over merchandise. The more I uploaded the more I was confident someone would like something, but they seemed to get lost in the sea of stuff out there.
Before you get too much deeper into this I do not yet have an answer. You’re not going to get to the end of this and find the answers to life, but maybe some of my current struggles and misdoings will give you insight or amusement…lol…
I stumbled across WooCommerce while developing this site, or an earlier version of it, and was amazed at how…I want to say simple, but maybe accessible is a better word…accessible it is to set up your own e-commerce solution. Plug-ins and step-by-step instructions make it, fairly, easy to get yourself going. Vendor apps, like Printful and Printify, feed back in and let you design and pull your merchandise back into your catalog.
I’m from an era of design where you sliced up an image and put it in a table to keep it together, and e-commerce was a whole lot of development, so being able to set up a solution like this one my own, granted it took a few tries, but I FINALLY prevailed and then…
It was just slow?
I wasn’t sure what I was doing wrong, so I contacted my webhost and they said I needed a better hosting package, so I tally-ho’d onwards thinking this was the magic formula and it turned out not to be.
Shopify was my next, and current, stop thinking they are optimized and for only $30/month would be worth it. They have a lot of advantages (optimized for e-commerce, templates, vendor apps, etc…) and I was able to set things up and plow ahead, sure this time I was on the right track!
Did I mention my first WooCommerce site was not set up properly so I waited for traffic for a couple of months unsure what was wrong, and I’m still not positively sure?
Marketing! Of course, people need to know about it, so Google and Facebook ads. They helped me set them up and soon I was spending $500/month on ads and traffic was rolling in from all over the world and the numbers had me giddy, but only, literally, 3 sales.
I let the ads run for several months, traffic never faltered, I tracked people even getting to the checkout, but never pulling the trigger and it confused me. My prices are more than competitive and designs unique.
I pulled back on the paid Google and FB ads, instead opting for free Google Ads, Minta, and Onollo, that let you schedule posts to your social media accounts and pull from your catalog of merchandise so you have a consistent parade of your stuff in front of the people that actually follow you. My traffic has fallen significantly, but there is still some and still no sales.
This has become a challenge or not only building an e-commerce platform but also a brand. It started out as, and really remains, a larger project to help me gather and give a home to what I’ve done to help remind me and push me to keep creating. So I push forward.
I get emails, form emails, daily from people who claim they can help my site without asking me what my concerns are and they go right in the trach or I hit the spam button.
This has all been a much larger undertaking than I initially, overconfidently, thought it would be. Between work, school (working on a Bachelors in Business at WGU which studying for was distracted by writing this…lol…) and trying to figure out what else I can do to help make the store more successful has become quite a task.
To that end I’m also reading Launch by Jeff Walker on Amazon he walks you through doing product and business launches. I’m still in the beginning of it, but will eventually do an update to see if it can help me.
If you’ve stuck with me this far the entire journey, based on my experience leads here…
At some point in your career, hopefully, you are going to have a moment of clarity where you realize you should be working for yourself. There is going to be SOMETHING you do that you are passionate about and have thought you would love to do that. If there isn’t yet, then you need to do more stuff until you find it.
Design is mine. I’ve done art and design for as long as I can remember and it has informed every step of my career and it’s where I fall back when attempting to solve problems in my life or at work.
From my experience, life is going to present opportunities to you, do what you can to prepare yourself and be ready for them. If you miss one, check it up to you not being ready and prepare yourself for the next time. Your time is coming, you just have to be prepared and recognize it.
You and I may not know each other, but I am rooting for you and if you have any question that I might be able to answer feel free to reach out and hit me up. [email protected]
