An Honest Look At How I Failed Massively In A New Business Venture
By: The Luna
Tags: Life Lessons, Entrepreneurship, Business, Ecommerce, Writers On Writing

An Honest Look At How I Failed Massively In A New Business Venture

Plus, how amazing things came out of it

Boredom can be a tricky area to navigate. Although, in some strange, fortunate fashion, it always seems to work out well for me.

One day, in one such lazy, bored, internet browsing session, I happened to stumble across E-commerce. Me, being my usual enthusiastic self, thought why not! It’s not like I have anything else to do anyways!

And so it began. My journey into establishing an International E-commerce store started just because I was bored and had nothing better to do.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

But hold up. It wasn’t all roses just yet.

I set up a cool shop with chic products, put up a nice boho theme, promoted (quite literally boasted) and was going as far to buy a domain and web hosting services.

In short, shit was getting real. I was ready to get all professional about something I knew nothing about. So, zero points for guessing how it went. It did not work out. If you are bored, you watch a TV show, hang out with your friends, play games or hell, go to sleep. But you do not start a business because you have run out of things to entertain yourself.

Buuut, here’s the insanely amazing unexpected goood things that came out of it.

I got a paid online store for free

Photo by Anete Lūsiņa on Unsplash

Here’s how the story goes -

While I was establishing my online store, I had to set up payments — all those things about how the customers would pay me, cards, PayPal and stuff. Now all these required having a government-approved business license which c’mon, of course, I did not have. So I chose the Cash on Delivery option just because I did not have to provide any government tax ID and stuff for that.

But then it clicked. Wait, how will the cash come to me? Now, I was using external suppliers for delivery, so technically it was them who would get the ‘cash on delivery’ and why and how would they give it to me? Hmm..

Eventually, I reached out to the support team for help. Now I was new and confused af. I asked several questions and the support guy probably got annoyed. So he replied a little rudely and that kinda pissed me off. Customer support is there to help you out, and they are trained to do it in a civil polite fashion. Plus, I was already upset about how difficult the whole set up was getting. Apparently, setting up an E-commerce store is not as easy as one imagines when they are bored and looking for something fun to do.

Anyways, when this dude sorta responded rudely, I ended the support chat and I got a feedback form. HEHE. You guessed it. I wrote a long angry response and decided to close the store. (because it was touughh, not because the dude was rude :P)

Then I switched off my computer and went back to being a regular person who binge-watches TV shows to deal with boredom.

Photo by freestocks on Unsplash

After 4 hours or so of mindless binging, I got up to check my mail and WOAH!

The team sent me a long apology letter and offered to pay for my store’s hosting expenses as a compensation for the earlier behaviour. SERIOUSLY?

They gave me a credit voucher that took care of the shop’s expenses and I was taken aback. Now I HAD TO come back right? I mean, I had a free store that somebody else was paying for and although I had no idea what to do with it, I figured I owed it to their kindness to at least try.

So, I reopened the store, tried to be a good businesswoman — I even set up the whole business license thingie whatever. Buuuut, the customers wouldn’t come. I mean how would they? They had to know about my store to come, right?

So I had to find ways to promote it. Now usually, there’s social media but generating a substantial following on a promotional account isn’t gonna happen overnight. People generally avoid following these ‘ad-type’ accounts that are full of ‘buy me-buy me’ posts. I hate those. And that is exactly what I had to do now.

Anyway, I tried. I set up Instagram, even learned how to open a product taggable Facebook shop, signed up for Twitter (IDK why, again, I thought why not?)

But I got 3 followers and one of them was my own writing account. Hmm, this wasn’t working. The only other option was — PAID ADS. What no. I was not going to pay for those irritating ads that keep popping out of nowhere when innocent netizens are happily trying to browse the net.

Hmm. What now? I tried some of the methods from ‘how to generate web traffic’ posts. But yeah, nothing worked. I was sooo frustrated by now.

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

And the thing is, I am a professional freelance writer. I have anything around 5–7 clients working with me at any given moment. Eventually, the client offers kept going up and it started becoming difficult to devote much time to an enterprise that had 0 views a day in spite of actively spending 5+ hours trying to promote it. While on the other hand, my beautiful clients were paying me loads of dollars for content writing :)

This seemed better. Mainly because I AM A WRITER AT HEART. I love what I do. And it’s not entirely about money. It’s about how it makes me feel. Being a professional writer, the creative process, seeing my beautifully written content babies being displayed on major sites and publications. It’s a feeling E-commerce could never match.

And no, not because writing is better than e-commerce or anything. Again, I feel so because I am a writer, not an e-commerce person. I am passionate about writing, I tried my hand at e-commerce just out of curiosity and it didn’t work out so well which was fine, because, for the hundredth time, I am a writer.

Pexels

This whole experience made me realise that at the core of my being, I am an artist. It inspired me to write a whole emotional rant about my undying love for art and how every one of us should honour the artist within.

And every day since then, before I went to sleep, there was a certain sense of satisfaction in my heart. I felt good to finally understand what truly made me happy. I felt proud to call myself an artist — because hey, we all struggle to do that sometimes.

So at the end of the day, when I look back at how this whole thing turned out, I feel a little bad that the store thing didn’t work out but I feel GREAAAT because, I said this before and I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it till my last breath and beyond — I AM AN ARTIST AND NOTHING IN THE WORLD CAN CHANGE THAT!