Learning Ecommerce and how its a tricky learning curve
Today I wanted to talk about how much running an online business changes your life, and also how it is difficult to get into the swing of it. Owning a business is a lot different now that we live in a digital age. Things like keeping up with social media and interacting with the community I would say are a lot more important than ever before. It's been hard for me to come out of my shell and start making media posts, honestly I am still not used to it. But it gets a little easier each time. I find myself asking if I should post or not. A lot of places say that daily posts are important. But I also don’t want to post meaningless content with the fear of being viewed as spam. This is all stuff I just need to figure out for myself honestly and I'm just looking for my big break. I haven’t reached out to bigger names in my industry but once I get a couple more sales under my belt and make a little bigger of a name for myself I would love to collaborate with people in the puppet community. I have the idea and I am almost certain it would interest a lot of people in the community. I just don’t want to be the guy who sends non-stop private messages spamming the hell out of their inbox until they notice me or resent me. I’m just going to try and make a few sales and try to have them notice me for my product and not just notice me because I wouldn't leave them alone. It's such an interesting time to have an online store, I've learned so much in the past couple of months. But I still have a lot more learning ahead. I still want to figure out how to promote my business online without just shoving money into it with little outcome. It worries me that conventions might not come back for a very long time because my puppets are meant to be built and enjoyed in a hands on experience around a crowd of onlookers who I know if they saw somebody building a puppet on spot with unique features and unlimited customizability they would for sure want one or atleast stop to watch and mention it to friends later. And THAT kind of exposure is absolutely priceless. But it's hard for me to do that sort of thing working only with the online community. I hope in the next few months to do a series of videos where I take you through the assembling of a puppet with a video for each individual piece. I feel like people don’t quite understand how my custom features work so i’m hoping small tutorials would help get my uniqueness a little more noticed. It's also a very hard situation at the moment because in Ontario everything is being shut down for a while and that includes my local fabric store. I don’t have a lot of material left and I have a full inventory of puppets. I personally can’t justify paying for shipping on more materials if I haven’t made any sales yet. So we can only hope that I can sell something in the next couple weeks and hopefully that will boost business, and if somebody with experience in ecommerce or somebody who is an expert puppet builder with a shop is reading this please guide me, any criticism is welcome and I am open to any advice that can be given! If you made it this far thanks for reading! I also see how the tone could be taken the wrong way with the blog post but please understand that I am still thrilled to be making puppets and it is just a bit stressful giving these times with covid and I totally understand that a holiday just went by and that can also leave people dormant when it comes to purchasing things that are totally unnecessary.
