My first website business failure

Well, I didn’t really want to write about this but I thought I might as well to help others avoid the same mistakes I did.

About a year ago I set up an online shop to sell wedding and hen night products. I built the site with oscommerce, bought some stock and promoted the site. I just couldn’t make very many sales (I made about 1 a month), so I decided to scrap it.

Here is why I think it failed

1. When I bought my stock I decided to buy only about 30 different items. I didn’t want to risk putting a lot of money into a new venture, I wanted to test the market to see if the products would sell. This had the negative of the shop looking small therefore losing confidence with my potential customers.

2. Low profit margin products – most products had a low value of between £2-£10. To make a decent profit would have meant selling a lot of items. I should have stocked some more expensive items such as jewellery.

3. Only accepting the paypal payment method. A lot of people don’t have a paypal account like my granddad for example.  Those with PayPal use ebay quite heavily to buy goods.

2 comments June 12th, 2006