5 important lessons I learnt in launching my eCommerce business
“I have carpenter mates that can build for themselves, sparkies that can do their own electrical work, yet I’m an accountant and I’m broke.” — a retired accountant friend.
When I decided that I was launching my first eCommerce business, I thought this will be a cinch! This is my domain! I will finally do for myself what I do for others! I can’t fail at this!
Some of us thrive when working for ourselves and some of us really struggle to produce the best work for ourselves. Why is it that? That, I don’t have the answer to, but what I do have are some lessons I have learnt.
Lesson 1. Nail your brand story FIRST
Your brand story/identity is going to rapidly change and evolve as you slowly start to understand what kind of business you want to build. The first few days and weeks I had a thousand different ideas of what I wanted to do. I had a general goal, but I was setting the goal posts way too wide.
Why is this important? Well, change is good, but too much change too fast can confuse your customers. You really want to be confident in WHO and what your brand is before you release it out into the wild. What are your brand values? Attributes? The brand tone of voice? Sit down, make a mood-board, sleep on it, get feedback. You’ll generally love whatever you come up with, but after some time you might realise that you haven’t exactly got it right. Take your time with this part, because this is your business’s legacy.
Lesson 2. Know who your target audience is
In my UX agency career, I have spent a good amount of time explaining to some clients that no matter how good their service/product/app is, it’s NOT going to be for everyone. You can’t please everyone and it’s hard to appeal to all. You need to KNOW who your audience is and capitalise on it.
Yet here I was in my first month, making the same mistake I see clients make all the time. I really said my product was for everyone *face-palm*. Saying my target audience was “women” was way too broad and held me back from really paying attention to what would be my actual target audience.
If you are unsure of who your target audience is at first, profile your ideal customer/client, then tweak it as you grow. The better you understand who your customer/client is, the better you’ll serve them.
Lesson 3. Fail FAST
There are two kinds of new business owners. The ones that sit on something for too long and the ones who don’t think about it long enough. I have learnt that I am the kind that gets caught up in the excitement of everything and will say YES to everything.
Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it could be. Mistakes will inevitably happen in a new business. Don’t let that get you down. Find your comfortable balance in decision making, own the mistake, take the lesson and move on. It’s better to fail fast and learn faster.
Lesson 4: Chucking money at it won't necessarily make it successful
“WOW, Facebook is so helpful lately!!!!” I’m sure plenty of new business owners can relate. Your feed will be spammed with promises of instant and continuous growth in sales, followers, web visitors, how to build an endless library of content, you name it.
Yes, I went down this trap. I wanted to know everything and I was willing to pay for it. The truth is, you can’t pay to give yourself a ‘success ‘injection. It takes time, it takes lessons and sometimes, you’ll just need to leave it to the professionals... Which is the perfect segway into my last lesson.
Lesson 5: You can’t do it all
With the experience of running my own business before and a career in UX/UI, this was one mistake I was bound to make. Yeah, I can code myself, yeah I can do product photography myself, yeah I know enough about digital marketing. Nope. Turns out I don’t know nearly enough. As much as you want to do it all yourself and bootstrap your business, sometimes it just makes sense to leave it to the professionals and trust me, it will pay itself off.
