As a first order of business, I decided to pivot from selling exclusively on Amazon to generating sales on my own website. Why, what’s changed? A lot. I started to see the limitations of my current business model. When I first started out, I was selling extremely niche products to a very small market. It didn’t require an advertising or marketing and Amazon just made it really easy to focus on just sending them inventory and they take care of the rest. I recently decided to break into a new market with a product targeting my newly discovered subculture, ultralight backpackers. I realized that selling exclusively on Amazon wasn’t generating many sales. I have to go find them. I have to setup an infrastructure to build a brand and community. I need an online presence. After rebranding the blog, I decided to add an online store.
After hours of research I decided to go with WooCommerce for my online store. This website is hosted on Bluehost, running WordPress, with some plugins like Astra and Elementor Pro. Just enough to get this blog started and going for a year. It’s important to note that installing Woocommerce is free. There are so many misleading funnels that make you believe you have to pay subscription fees for every add-on, plug-in, and pro version. Don’t get stuck paying these annual subscriptions hoping you forget about in a year and mindlessly renew without ever really using the product. That kind of happened with a few website tools, security, and SEO products I thought I needed when I started the website. I made sure not to renew the ones I didn’t need this year and figure out what I need moving forward. Here’s what I found.
I discovered early in the business that fulfilling my own inventory sucks. Every time I got an order, I had to print out a label, box up a product, drive it to the post office, drop it off, and go back home. This happened for every single order. When orders come in sporadically I found myself making trips on odd days really taking away a sense of freedom from the business. This is one of the main reasons I initially decided to go exclusively on Amazon. Here’s the beauty of this new system.
I found a plug-in by Never Settle called WooCommerce Amazon Fulfillment. With a name like that, I don’t know why it took me so long to find. Anyway, for $99 a year, the plug-in seamlessly integrates my WooCommerce store to send an order to Amazon to tell them to ship the products I have in their warehouses to the customer that bought on my website. The shipping payment is automated from my Amazon seller account and they even send tracking information and this information reflects on my WooCommerce orders screen. It’s basically Amazon Prime for customers on the website. All I did was install and activate it and it was ready to go. Amazing. I’m still ironing out the details but I had a successful test order and I’m really happy with the results. So now, I have my own website where I can build my own community and provide the customer service I want to find my tribe. It gives me more time without having to pick, pack, and ship products myself anymore. This way I can still focus on sending bulk inventory to Amazon as my primary fulfillment center while keeping it up on Amazon as the brand gains traction.
Another fun note is that I’m experimenting with a bitcoin payment option. I really think bitcoin is going to be a really big part of our future. I believe that learning about it early is integral to future-proof myself for the oncoming changes. Plus, it makes for a great business opportunity setting them up for others and trying to make it easy as possible. I’ll write about it in the next post once I figure out how to do it. Essentially it’s a BTCPay server using my own domain name hosted on LunaNode. So far it was super easy to do and definitely an Ultralight Ideas. Stay tuned.