Remember my beautiful new dedicated Virtual Assistant Business Forms store I announced over this past summer? The one on an actual e-commerce site with its own domain?
Yeah, that didn’t work out so well, LOL.
Originally, it seemed like such a good idea to move my products to their own dedicated store. I thought an e-commerce site would allow me to better organize things and provide a way for shoppers to search for and view products in many different, more convenient ways.
One of the biggest problems I encountered was with the e-commerce template we purchased. It was a fiasco from day one and honestly, I am nowhere nearer to knowing what would have been a better e-commerce template to use on a WordPress driven site.
But I had already committed to this, and I was bound and determined to make it work. I spent beaucoup bucks having my programmer get things working. He basically had to rewrite everything from scratch.
But it was worth it to me. I thought once we were done, we’d have a product site that would be much more user-friendly and easier for my site visitors to navigate. On top of that, there wouldn’t be any monthly fees paid to a shoppingcart service because it was all built in and customized.
Sounds great, right?
Well here’s what happened…
After much, much time and energy, we finally got things looking and working fabulously. I was absolutely loving it!
Moving everything over to the new site, I was prepared to lose some traffic at first. I was even prepared to lose a few customers as the new store required folks to create an account so they could download their products.
The reason I thought this would be beneficial was because instead of links that expired in a certain timeframe, they could always go to their account to download their products. With an account-based system, they would also always have access to the latest versions of any products they had purchased. I thought, who wouldn’t love that?!
Well, sales did slow to a trickle. But I expected that.
Then we discovered another significant issue in the affiliate programming–nothing that affected our affiliates, just stuff that forced more manual processes than should have been. My programmer went to valiant, heroic efforts in getting the bugs worked out, but ultimately he advised me to just scrap things. It would simply cost too much and we’d already sunk soooo much money into recoding everything at it was.
I would have been happy to spend the money if it meant making things work except for one ultimate deal breaker…
I TOTALLY underestimated how much people hate creating accounts in order to purchase things!
As I said, I knew going in that I’d probably lose a few customers due to the account thing.
I never anticipated, however, that sales would pretty much come to a screeching halt. That’s how dramatic the difference was. And so I had to finally admit defeat. The new store was a complete bust.
We’re back to using the original store and sales have come back through the roof!
I know I used the word “fail” in my post title, but I don’t really consider it a fail. I learned a lot (albeit expensively) about consumer buying habits, what works and what doesn’t, and missteps to avoid in future scenarios like this.
I love that I can make decisions without endlessly deliberating over them. I love that I can take leaps, fully commit myself to seeing things through, yet still have the sense to know when it’s time to fold. I know that I still have great instincts in business and nine times out of 10, I’m gonna rock it!
I never want to be afraid to try new things just because it might not work out. Fortunately, I still have that spirit.
And I wish the same for you which is the lesson and the reason I share this with you today.
Rock on, all you fearless entrepreneurs!
Here’s what you have to always remember about clients looking to hire you: They don’t know you.
