My first website business failure

June 12th, 2006

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.

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Entry Filed under: Internet business

2 Comments Add your own

  • 1. MrPenn  |  July 25th, 2006 at 10:58 pm

    While I am by no means an expert on the subject– using OScommerce is an of itself was probably problematic.

    Were you using tracking software to see where you were losing Cx’s? What was your % of abandoned shopping carts? Do you think OSCommerce’s demand that you create an acct. may have had something to do with it? 30 products isn’t necessarly bad– a friend of mine sell 4 products and does just fine…but the website is very straight forward and still provides the customer with a lot of options when they are ready to pay.

  • 2. L146705  |  July 26th, 2006 at 12:22 pm

    If I was to do it again I would use the creloaded package with all the mods installed. I never liked the fact that you had to sign up to a oscommerce account before buying but there are mods to sort out this problem. The same as there are mods to check the abandoned carts. I installed a lot of mods(modifications) on the site myself but found that there was a lot that oscommerce left to be desired.

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