Category: Uncategorized

Sale on Origins products in the month of September!

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.

Ah, the joys of drop shipping as an online merchant. When I first plotted out how I was going to start up my little shop, I struggled with the overwhelming cost of buying merchandise. Even at wholesale, there were minimums that made it too cost prohibitive. Not to mention many of the vendors I came across do NOT like small, new and online only, but limiting what I offered to what I could afford would essentially mean an empty shop. Enter drop shipping.

I’d read the articles on how it worked, the success stories and how it enabled people to grow and build their business while saving the need for space at your place and hey, no need to track inventory they said. The fee seemed a decent trade-off, I could stock up on certain items that seemed to have more traction while doing drop ship orders on products with a slower purchase rate. The best part of all, I wouldn’t have to constantly check on inventory levels for more than a handful of “bestsellers”. It seemed a perfect plan of action for starting out. But we live in fickle times, with fickle markets, vendors and manufacturers.

What started as a way of balancing the need for variety and a very limited starting budget has since become a nightmare of balancing sudden changes in vendors and availability. Sometimes that’s just as simple as locating a new place to get the product from. Other times, and more frequently it feels, it’s a product that’s suddenly discontinued in the middle of an customer order. I’d enter the blushing emoji, but honestly I don’t know how to in WordPress, but that’s me, blushing in embarrassment when I have to email the customer back with a “hey, so…you’re waiting on me who’s waiting on them”. And even worse when it’s “whoops, but it looks like this isn’t a thing I can get you…even though I said I could”. Bad look, all the way around.

The solution is really simple enough. Don’t rely on drop shipping and instead rely on your own inventory stash…that yes, you track the inventory level on. It means a big difference in some things, but I want us to be able to provide you the things you’re asking for.

Adsgshhshchgfytnsnwj? Like, you know that there’s a bunch of things to do. There so much to do, in fact, that you just…stop. There’s a little voice at the back of your mind is practically screaming that you don’t have time to sit and stare off mindlessly when there’s a to-do list a mile long!! While the rest of you just can’t get on that same level and you tell yourself that you’ll do it tomorrow. Suddenly, you can’t seem to recall the scale of time. It was…only a couple of days ago, but you know it had to have been more than that. You count and it’s been 2 weeks. Still you can’t quite bring yourself to up to the level that you can work on it.

I find that even 3 months into life without Gaia, it’s a continued state of grief and depression. A lifetime has passed in these 3 months, only it was just yesterday. How did I ever forget how bad things were before she came along? She was perfection and therapy and magic. Anyone who’s ever been drowning in the dark waters and found their salvation can understand what I mean. Here is a source of hope, love. It becomes an enormous part of you as you build your day around it. You build your life around that salvation like a religion. I’m angry that so much time I could have spent with her was wasted at an office or sitting in traffic. I’m sad that we’ll never snuggle again where she comes and sits right on my chest, or curls up in my lap, the move she would make to settle in with that little sigh…even the way that she let me hold her like a teddy bear as we drifted off to sleep. and I’m absolutely devastated, just heart-brokenly ashamed to know that there will come a time when, from simple human weakness, I will forget tiny details about her. It rips the air from me every time.

Hold your fur baby tight, lavish them with attention, with toys and delectable food. Throw that ball and let them on the couch with you while you can. They are so incredibly brief in your life.