I’m not big on social media, which means that I’m not really great at maintaining the engaging and consistent marketing an online business nowadays needs in order to see growth. Website development is not one of my finer-tuned skillsets and making sure everything runs smoothly and looks good is challenging and time-consuming. In some cases, I just have to leave it as is unless I pay someone else to do the website. Thanks to repeated issues with drop shipping inventory never being available after a customer purchased from me, I’ve stopped listing items that I don’t physically have in my inventory. Except, purchasing inventory and storing it (in my house) can get costly and takes up space I don’t really have. The additional downside to that is that the list of available products I show on my site becomes very slim. The money for all of this was coming from my very tiny “discretionary spending” funds out of my full-time job paycheck.
See, this started as a labor of love. I wanted to open an actual physical store in my town so that I could spend time with my elderly and beloved lil’ foof. I had a vision in my mind of a small Mom n’ Pop shop around the corner from my house, no long commute and I could bring her with me; put in a doggie bakery making wholesome snacks, have eco-friendly products, and get to know my local neighbors when they stopped by. Little did I know that about a month after I started planning all of this, she would be killed. When that happened, I kind of gave up on the physical store. There wasn’t as much urgency to get that going because she was already gone. But what I didn’t want to do was give up this business that I made for her; in her honor and in her spirit.
I decided at the beginning of the year that I was going to focus full-time on the side businesses I’d been cultivating for the last few years and quit my toxic job. My hustles weren’t exactly covering the bills, so no more steady paycheck, but I felt very confident that the timing was good and with some dedicated focus, they would grow to be sufficient before too long passed. But costs are rising everywhere; even beyond living expenses, the products, the materials (for this and the other businesses), and the shipping are creeping upwards. I found that the MSRP I’m supposed to charge for the Origins 5-in-1 was significantly higher than what I had listed, my flat rate shipping and free shipping options (an attempt to try and match with Amazon, which is impossible really) are so low that I don’t make any profit off this. Without any profit, I can’t afford to grow the inventory options and without options well, all that I can sell is the item that doesn’t make a profit and now that it needs to stand on its own, no profit means I can’t even order more of what does sell.
I’ll be updating some pricing for products and shipping in order to help earn an actual profit. The website is going to get a make-over but also…kind of a downgrade? The goal here will be to streamline the store to show what I have on hand until I can afford to have an array of merchandise. Working on the website is very time-consuming and since my wheels are spinning on multiple projects, I need to make this as easy and simple for me to juggle along with the other things I’m doing to try and generate income. I do plan to keep the shop open and selling my only seller, Origins 5-in-1, but in all honesty, I might have to stop this all together for a time if I continue to have no income as I won’t be able to afford to order more supplies.
So updates, changes in pricing and hopefully growth and not the other thing.