How NOT to run an e-commerce store
By: Neil Byers
Tags: Mistakes, Shopify, Failure, Ecommerce

How could I fail? I had the digital tools, experience and skills — everything required to build a successful e-commerce store — yet it failed.

So what did I learn?

The Idea

Photo by Frank Vessia on Unsplash

In the height of lockdown I set myself the challenge to get huggletime.com up and running as an e-commerce site in the space of 4 hours. Which I did — Happy Days!

The plan was to launch and let it run by itself, if it made any money — great, if not, well all I had lost was an evening of my time. Then I started tweaking it…

Too Fast, Too Soon

I started out with a one page site, pointing people to Redbubble, where the products would be made on a Print-on-demand, drop-shipping basis. Simple!

I set up the Facebook page and Instagram accounts, ready to promote my lovely t-shirts and hoodies. I knew it wouldn’t be overnight, but I was sure success would quickly come along!

A few months went by, I posted on social media, I promoted the odd post — a trickle of traffic headed to my shop, but no sales. “It must be the Redbubble site that is confusing people” I thought. “So make it more on-brand” my head screamed. So to Shopify I went.

So with very little traffic, and no sales I decided to invest in a Shopify account and build a new site, connected with Printful to be my new printing partner — and within a week I had made a sale! “Told you” said my brain, “this e-commerce stuff is easy” — how very wrong I was.

I tweaked it, improved it, spent hours adjusting the smallest of details. More sales were due any moment…

6 months later it is my only sale, and thanks to me not pricing the product correctly I made a profit of 49p — not going to retire on that!

So 2 lessons here:

Be wary about investing in technology until you are sure people actually want to buy your products. Pay attention to the pricing, promotions and the cost of producing your goods.

Likes Don’t Equal Sales

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

I wasn’t getting sales, so more traffic was obviously the answer!

So I went big on promoting via social media, creating target audiences, clever creative, purchasing ads all over Facebook and Instagram.

The numbers looked good. Plenty of likes, a few comments, more traffic to the site — but still no sales. I tweaked the audience, changed the ads, tried everything I could think of!

One post had over 500 likes, but only 2 people visited the site — it was about this point I started to think this wasn’t going to work!

In fact the only thing my activity seemed to do was drive a number of “influencer” accounts to contact me, promising to help me reach thousands of new followers for a small fee.

I’m naturally cynical about such claims, but I thought “what the hell — give it a shot”. So one lucky “influencer” took a small fee from me, added the Instagram story I created and sent it out to their 25k followers.

Result? 2 more followers for me. Not exactly what I was promised.

So lessons here:

Social media likes don’t equal sales. Seems obvious, but it’s hard not to believe that when a post is going great guns it’s not going to result in money in the bank! Be wary of “influencers” — don’t get sucked in by the numbers they have. Social media posting is a science and art all to itself.

Product Is Still King

Stepping back from the technology, the design, and the social media posts, I screwed my Product Management head back on. It should have been obvious months ago what the real issue was — my products weren’t very good!

When I’m developing a new product or feature, the first thing I ask is “what problem is this solving?”, and the answer for Huggle Time was “none”!

The printed t-shirt/hoodie market is massive and crowded. My products were not niche or unique enough for anyone to buy. Huggle Time was all about giving hugs and getting cosy with people.

Launched in the middle of a global pandemic… when you aren’t allowed to get close to anyone….. I think I may have found the flaw here.

What now?

I’ve gone back to the drawing board. Shopify was ditched, spending money on social media posts was ditched, and the products removed from all sites. My initial venture into e-commerce has come to an end.

So I’ll go back to my notebook, and start working on the next idea…..it’s probably not going to be an e-commerce store!