In January 2024 I decided to start an online store. My idea was to sell funny IT / Office t-shirts and mugs as well as motivational gear. I chose to do Print on Demand since I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into inventory to test my idea out. After reading up on my storefront options I decided to go with Shopify, because it seemed like I would have more options for customizing my store, and I could better grow my business if it worked out. At the time they were having a $1 a month for 3 months offer which sounded great to me. I should have this all worked out in 3 months, right? 🤣
Shopify Custom Domain Setup
After getting the initial shop set up, I wanted to use my own domain name instead of the default Shopify domain – so shop.it-adventures.com. While the Shopify instructions initially seemed straight forward, they didn’t work. I ended up having to set up a subdomain at Bluehost for shop.it-adventures.com, remove the default A records pointing to Bluehost and create the records pointing to Shopify. Sounds simple but it took me a little bit to figure out.
POD Setup and Product Pricing and Testing
I read a lot of reviews, and chose Printful for my POD service based on their reputation for high quality products. I went with a free account to start out. There was a bit of a learning curve using their tools to design my products and get them over to my store but nothing major. The actual designing part is a lot of fun (and a great outlet for my sarcasm!). What wasn’t so fun was realizing how high my prices were going to have to be to cover Printful’s (and all of the POD services) costs. I could lower the costs by signing up for a Printful plan, but I didn’t want to sink more money into this side hustle until I knew it would work. I knew I wanted to offer free shipping and factor that into the product price because I hate getting hit with high shipping prices at check out and usually abandon the order. I figured a lot of people feel the same. I spent a good amount of time looking into pricing and came out believing that if your product is unique enough and people in your niche want it, they will buy it at the higher price.
So next I ordered some products to check quality and make sure all the components of my store were functioning correctly. Products took 6-7 days to arrive. Sure, it’s not Amazon, but again if it’s something unique that people want, they’ll wait. Printful’s quality was good, as advertised – no problems there. I learned a few things by testing the process, tweaked my store settings and so now we were headed into April.
Going Live
At this point Shopify starts charging me $39.99 a month for my store subscription. I’ve kept a password on my store up until now because I wanted to make sure I had what I felt was enough products, had all my policies in place, and understood SEO. I take the password off thinking if I show up in some Google searches and people start hitting my store, I’m ready now. I was such an optimist! 😊
Advertising Woes – Google, Amazon, Facebook and Instagram
Now I had to figure out how to get people to my store. I set up a Google Merchant account and linked my store through Shopify’s built in integration thinking I can get some free Google Ad traffic that way. I followed all the instructions, uploaded my sitemap, and made a ton of attribute changes to my products to fix Google errors. Just as I got those all fixed and it looked like they’d be approved I got the warning “Website or online store needs improvement” shown below:
I went over and over the list of requirements. Checked everything multiple times. I did initially have some placeholder text in a couple of my policies that I had created from a template. Fixed those and resubmitted for review. Not only did it come back as not fixed, but now my account was “Suspended for Misrepresentation”
I opened a help ticket with Google and the response was to just point me to their policies. I did ask if POD was accepted in Merchant Center because I found a lot of people saying that it wouldn’t be approved but the person that responded from Google said it was not an issue to be POD. I read through all the policies, checked everything so many times, spent a ton of time researching, but couldn’t get past this. After about a month of working on this I said screw it! This was by far the most frustrating thing I ran into. Seems like a racket as of course there are all kinds of people out there that offer to help you get past this, for a small fee.
Not to be discouraged, after listening to a podcast on Amazon Merch on Demand, which is also free to get into, I decided to try it. The podcaster gave some very good, detailed instructions on how to apply for that program and I followed those to the letter, waited about a week to hear back and…….DENIED! Back in the podcast comments I see that probably half or more of the people had the same experience and the only recourse is to try again, but with the catch that you have to use a different email account each time. Nope, I’m out!
At this point it was the beginning of November. I’d been getting some traffic to my store but no sales and getting a sale by Christmas was my original goal. So, I decided to try the social media route. I started a Facebook and Instagram business account and did a test between running a paid ad for $100 and boosting a post for $35. My Ad got over 300 reactions, and the boost got 50. I also did a bunch of posts and reels and saw a lot of traffic make it to my shop, 1 abandoned cart, but still no sales.
Summary
I did a lot of evening and weekend work on this project throughout the year, lots more than I’ve outlined here, so I ended 2024 pretty discouraged in my ability to reach my goal. I took a little time off from both my day job and this hobby store over the holidays to regroup. Now it’s 2025 and looking back I’ve learned a lot and had some fun doing it, and that was a great part of taking this journey. Now I’m refueled and ready to resume the adventure!
Stay tuned for updates, and in the meantime if anyone has any words of wisdom they would like to share I’d love to hear them!