My First Week of E-Commerce
It’s been a week now since I launched this website. In that time there’s been over 3000 sessions, more than 100 orders, and many lessons learned. I spent months preparing for this, years if you count all the thinking time. But it wasn’t until October last year until I actually started to make the effort to create the website. Black Friday was the goal, then it was Christmas… by 2025 I just wanted to get it going, but there was always something. It seemed every time I looked at the website I found something that could be improved or found an issue with one of the products that I’d need to change, then wait for samples to arrive. By the end of January I decided I would just launch and deal with any problems as they came. You can only do so much testing after all.
I first posted publicly about the website at 8pm on Sunday 26th January. A couple of friends around the world had placed test orders for me before then, but pretty much all the end to end testing was done just before launching. I launched with more than 100 products, a handful of very lengthy blogs, and information about myself which had enough spelling mistakes casting no doubt about who had written it. Overall the initial reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and I had around 50 orders in the first few hours.
This behaviour was expected as it’s how the launch of my first store went down which was hosted by Teespring. That store went live in 2021 and also had a great initial response, but by the end of 2022 the costs were getting a bit silly so I powered it down so I could concentrate on setting this one up. Here we are 2 years later, a fully functioning website that can offer merch with a more reasonable ticket price, whilst also netting me more profit at the same time. That was the main objective. I’m pretty confident I’ve achieved that.
What this past week has made me realise though was how much Teespring actually did for their cut. I’m hoping these issues are just teething problems, and now things are set up, that the seas will be much calmer. They not only hosted the website, but took care of all returns, refunds, customer support, integrations such as YouTube, all the website formatting and product designs. I just had to add a design to their site, tick a few boxes, and then you could have pretty much whatever you wanted with my logo on it. There were catches of course, I remember having to wait a while in order to be eligible to sell beanies from them. They had some metrics that calculated your entry for that, as it wasn’t available without having a good selling record. But they wouldn’t tell you what that was, when I asked they’d just tell me that I was on the right path and keep going… Eventually they let me in, but that was another thing that the costs were just silly on. In order to make it worth my while I’d have to ask around £25. I’m sure people would pay that, especially if they thought I was making a decent profit on it, but I wasn’t. You were getting an average product for a premium price, whilst I made negligible profit. This happened to most items following the formal divorce of the UK and EU, it might be better now on Teespring, but I decided to leave.
Example above regarding the hoops I'd have to jump through, without knowing what they were. Now I have control over everything. Supplier doesn’t want to sell beanies? No worries, I’ll find another. The beauty of Print on Demand is the flexibility. It’s not perfect, but I think it will work best for me going forward. I was planning to have physical stock held at Darkside’s vast warehouse, this way could have meant the most profit, but it does limit flexibility. It also introduces another party into the mix, and as good as I am friends with those who burn the midnight heavy oil, I wouldn’t be able to pick and choose products like I can now. I would have to make a decision and stick it out. Anyone who knows me personally will attest to my indecisiveness, it’s a curse, and picking what products to list was causing me some stress.
For example I’ve been able to add a few T-shirts that people requested since launching. Had I done that with physical stock, I would have needed to order at least 10. They were designs I’d done before so samples weren’t necessary, but I’d still have had to order stock in and the admin associated. There’s enough admin involved as it is, not sure I could take anymore!
The initial problems I faced were mostly my fault. The one that maybe wasn’t was to do with my bank. I’d set up another account to handle the ecommerce side of things as I figured it would get quite noisy. That’s another thing I quickly missed about Teespring, they’d just give me a cut of the profits whenever I fancied it. It was like a little savings account. Incoming funds are quite similar with the new setup, but everytime I receive an order I have automation that then orders the item with my supplier. If your order has items that come from multiple suppliers, such as a sticker and a T-shirt, then I’ll have 2 suppliers to pay. I set this up with my card and after 20 orders or so it started to get declined. I figured this was my bank just taking precautions as the card/account were new, but nope. They just weren’t happy with the amount of transactions that were going on. It took me a while to get this answer out of them, apparently there was nothing they could do about it either. I explained why, but they said there was no way to prevent this protection from kicking in, and they suggested just using my card less. I’ve lost count how many times I had to explain this was the result of automations, but fortunately one of my suppliers provided a workaround for this. Must have been a common issue. Now they just bill me £100 at a time, and keep credit on their account until the next time that comes around.
For the things that definitely were my fault, the most interesting is probably the sticker shop mess up. Unfortunately the supplier who does all my clothing doesn’t do stickers, and finding a supplier to do stickers was actually pretty tough. There’s plenty out there, but to fit my criteria of having fulfilment in the UK, Shopify integration, and the sale of individual stickers didn’t leave many options. I found one, but getting the integration configured wasn’t fun. They had guides, and getting products set up wasn’t too bad, but the guide for their shipping configuration led to a 404, page cannot be found. I contacted support and got a bit of a wishy washy reply. Unfortunately I didn’t really have another option so I had to make it work. I got some samples and they seemed pretty good, although being Kiss Cut stickers I'd have to make some changes to my designs to suit that. I had a decent roster of images that would make decent stickers, I think it was around 10 in the end. I got them all configured lovely and sent them on their way.
Around midnight on launch night there was some chatter on my Discord from a few lads who were being told that their relatively normal postcodes were being denied shipping from my website. I think one was Aberdeen, the other Wales. So relatively normal. This thankfully led me into an investigation which uncovered quite a few more problems. The reason they were seeing this message was to do with how Shopify handles markets, or should I say how I'd configured them. I’d tried to configure a flat rate for shipping all stickers which I think was £3. That was what I’d paid when getting my samples so figured that would be what I’d get charged, so I was simply passing that cost on. Not making a profit, but not letting it become a drain. Or so I thought!
As I said before the integration for this supplier was quite tricky, vastly different to that of the other 2 which were quite similar. This supplier takes a copy of your inventory then asks you which products you want fulfillment on. But remember the shipping guide wasn’t there anymore. They were aware that the customer might be ordering multiple things from multiple suppliers, so had a feature that would automatically select the best shipping based on the customers basket. There were 3 options, Budget, Standard, and Express. I’m sure you can work out the differences, but these are just stickers, sent out as letters and delivered by Royal Mail.
The automation selected Express, for everyone. Every single order that I’d received that night, regardless of the shipping methods on the other items, defaulted to express shipping. For UK orders this wasn’t the end of the world, I’d get charged £6, you’d pay me £3, I’d lose £3. If you ordered 2 stickers or less that would put me in the red, but not by a massive amount. If you were from Europe however this is where things take a turn for the worst. As you can imagine express shipping to the continent wasn’t quite as affordable. This supplier has a warehouse in UK and NL, so euro orders go from NL to avoid any Brexit problems, but it’s still costly. This is what stung the most. A letter of stickers weighing no more than 50g will still cost £20 if you want it there the next day. There goes all the profit and then some. Luckily I noticed this quickly enough and was able to force all orders to be set to ‘budget’ shipping. I figured that would be enough for stickers. It allowed me to lower the cost for domestic orders too. Good times.
Customer service hasn’t been too bad, definitely more than I’d hoped but again hopefully these are just teething problems. I think I’ve had to reach out to around 10 people so far. The bulk of that was from Paypal, despite me making an effort to not enable Paypal on the shop, Shopify thought it would be fun to accept payments from it anyway. I had an option on my admin dashboard prompting me to finish Paypal setup, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to use it. What I didn’t realise was that Shopify would still accept payments that way, and that the funds would be held at ransom until I created a Paypal account. I was pretty pissed off at this. Due to the way the shop works I’d already paid the invoices for the products, but was unable to receive the payment from the customer until I signed up to Paypal? Ridiculous.
I didn’t want to use Paypal for a few reasons, the fees are higher, it’s another account to manage, and as a consumer I’ve found Paypal to be more of a hindrance than anything these days. I use Apple Pay instead of Paypal on eBay now, and have been weaning my subscriptions away from it gradually. Back in the day Paypal made me feel safer online, but in recent times I’ve found it just slows down the process. So despite knowing it might cost me some sales, I didn’t want to use it. I’d also heard plenty of horror stories about how Paypal deals with disputes, rarely siding with businesses even with clear evidence of foul play. I didn’t want to get involved.
I think there were 7 orders in total who’d checked out with Paypal before I was able to deactivate it properly. I reached out to those people and thankfully they were supportive. I had to ask them to cancel the Paypal on their side (it was still pending), then to pay another way. The most annoying part about this was that Shopify counted these transactions as paid, so the automation kicked in and ordered the goods from my suppliers. If I didn’t have good customers then they could have cancelled the Paypal and received the goods anyway, out of my pocket. All this just to try and make me sign up to Paypal. It had the reverse effect for sure. I think I hate it even more now.
The other customer services stuff has been people ordering the wrong size, or my supplier saying they couldn’t deliver that colour/size at the moment. The latter is quite easy to deal with, but people ordering the wrong size are going to give me some headaches in the future I think. Everything is printed on demand, and as soon as my order has been printed with the suppliers, I’m not able to cancel. This would be a big benefit of having physical stock. Ordered the wrong size? No worries, let me sort that out for you. I could go in the back room and swap it. Now if you order the wrong size, or decide you don’t like an item, I can’t return it. But as a consumer, you have the right to return the goods to me for a refund or exchange.
This is a fan shop and I hopefully will only ever deal with customers who like my content, and therefore should be a little bit more lenient with me, but it’s still my responsibility as a retailer to ensure you’re happy with what you get. If nothing else it’s my reputation, and happy customers are more likely to order again I’d guess.
Another question is how should I be contacted? I’ve made a contact me page which states to email me about any order problems. This is definitely the best way. I was playing with Shopify yesterday and accidentally enabled a feature that allows live chat. See how long that lasts, not sure it will be there forever. I really want people to have a good experience on my website whether it be buying merch or reading my blogs, but customer service is not something I’m experienced with. Hopefully I won’t need to be, going back to the point of sales being from the love of my content, rather than the products themselves. Although if I want this to be a decent earner in the future I’m going to have to have products that people could buy without even knowing what my channel was. Unlikely, but worth keeping in mind.
The final task that was much more of an undertaking than expected was Google integration. Another thing that was handled very well by Teespring previously. I believe it was just a tick box, and then magically the products would appear underneath my videos. Setting this up on my own store has been a pain in the ass. Google has very strict requirements that you need to meet before even being able to qualify for this. Most of them made sense, legal things that I probably should have anyway, but some of them definitely seemed a bit extreme. For example all my products and their variants needed gender and age tags before they’d even consider them. Google then tries to sneak in some ‘benefits’ that include using their checkout instead of Shopify’s. They tell you this will increase sales, etc. Just keep the box ticked and move on. I wasn’t keen on that idea, I wanted my products under my videos, but I wanted people to visit my website. Google was only interested in selling the products. I guess that could be a benefit to some people but not myself. My products could also end up on Google results in the future. I’ve not got this sussed out yet and everything is pending a review by them, so hopefully by the time I post my next video I’ll have some products alongside it.
To wrap it up I think the launch went reasonably well. There’s a lot of things that could have gone better behind the scenes, but the general reception was overwhelmingly positive. I’m enjoying writing blogs, and I’m hopeful this launch is just the start of an exciting future. If nothing else I’ve achieved my goal of having my own website, something I’ve been looking to do for years. I have plenty of ideas still floating around for more things to implement, including an endless list of future blog posts. I’ll be adding an affiliates section today which will include information about the companies I’ve worked with in the past, including discount codes and that sort of thing. It’s starting to feel like 2025 now, the 2024 job list is coming to an end.
Thanks for all the support.
Dan
