Wow, almost 4 months has gone by since my last post - the longest I've ever gone between posts. I had kept intending to write one, but so much has been happening, that I just haven't had time.
In June and July I was preoccupied with getting my website populated with all my E-bay listings, while at the same time trying to list new material on the website. Although the website interface had many good and useful features, the import of listings was not at all seamless. There was no way to import directly from E-bay. Fortunately for me, I had created everything after April 2016 on Auctiva, and the website interface was with Auctiva Commerce. Indeed, what had made me choose Auctiva Commerce was (1) a complete lack of awareness of what was out there, and (2) I was pleased with how simple Auctiva had made my life with E-bay. But, because of that, I didn't do my homework. I assumed that Auctiva Commerce would work well for me.
There were lots of good features and I could tell that when the product came out in 2009, it was cutting edge. But almost instantly, there were things that I noticed that I didn't like:
- Even though I had created over 6,000 listings in Auctiva, the import from Auctiva to Auctiva commerce was not seamless. The item quantities did not import, the SKU's did not import, the meta data for SEO did not import, and not all of the images imported and often not in the right order. So, in order to bring the new website online I was faced with having to edit over 6,000 listings, even though I had created them on a product that Auctiva themselves had designed. FIRST MAJOR RED FLAG!
- There was no integration with any social media channels AT ALL. In fact, to be on the website interface, it was as if social media did not exist.
- I had paid a high monthly fee - $120 USD for nearly 2 years because I didn't want to lose all the setup work I had done on the store before April 2018. There was no way to pause it, or downgrade it without losing my work. So I paid through the nose. During those 2 years I never saw Auctiva do an upgrade to the interface. Not once.
- There were other things that I couldn't customize, like the buy button, which was a small link rather than a large button. I was limited to 5 web pages in my navigation, so I had to pack a lot of information into them, making for very, very long web pages.
- The home page design looked dated.
Despite all this, I decided to press on anyway, reasoning that my customer base would still like the site. I reasoned that I could use workarounds to deal with the lack of social media integration and other issues. I believe now that it was because I had forgotten the issue of sunk cost, and it never occurred to me that even though I would lose the work I had done to that point if I scrapped it and went with a more cutting edge platform, that I might gain far more in productivity.
Finally about four weeks ago, I was doing some listings on the website. I had discovered the "variants" feature where I could pack all the varieties into one listing using drop down menus, which would allow me to replace what had previously been 25-50 listings, with one single listing. It would save time and would make shopping easier for customers. I was really excited, and I spent a day on listings for two Scott numbers, which would have taken me a week to do before.
But then I went to test the listings out and it took 6 full seconds for the listing to respond when the option in the first of three dropdown menus was selected. Then it took another 6 seconds for the other two. So, it was half a minute before you could even see what options were available. I realized that there was no way that customers would ever put up with this. Then I started running tests on the web page speeds and on the shopping cart. They were awful: every page was taking 6-8 seconds to load and my traffic was bouncing terribly. I realized at that moment that the site was useless unless something could be done to speed it up. I contacted support and was told that nothing could be done ant it was suggested that I needed to use a different store theme. I decided to investigate further, bu looking online to see if anyone else with Auctiva had this problem. Lo and behold I discover that many, many users have complained about slow loading speeds from the beginning, when Auctiva went in this business in 2009. So, cleary they knew about the issues and had no intention of fixing them. They were charging a premium price for an inferior product.
This brings me to my first life lesson learned:
Never trust a business to offer value for money, or assume that they will act rationally in this regard. They won't. Some businesses are only interested in milking their initial investment for as much as they can get, and do not care at all about what happens to you. Also, if you feel in your gut that you are working with an inferior product, STOP, and look for an alternative.
Do not make the mistake of sticking it out - particularly with an IT or technological product. The reason is simply that whatever problem you have encountered is very unlikely to be the only one. Technology is constantly changing to the point that your E-commerce company should be making constant updates to the architecture. By the time you are able to clearly notice that an E-commerce or other technological solution is dated, it means that the company selling it is milking their investment. It is already too late.
I had mistakenly assumed that speed of loading would not be an issue for my website, because I knew how critical this is to Google. I assumed that a company like Auctiva would not dare sell a product that would be so inferior as to doom their users to low Google search rankings. But I was wrong. I would have avoided this though if I followed my instincts and acted as soon as I noticed the first problems with the import from Auctiva, or the complete lack of social media integration.
So, at the beginning of August, I was in a position of realizing that all the work I had done since February was all for nought. I had an incredibly sinking feeling.
The following week, I started with Shopify and boy was in for a pleasant surprise. What I saw was an up to date interface, that was designed impeccably. I saw a platform which fully integrates every major social media platform you can think of. I saw an interface that is replete with apps and tools that will help you with the tedious tasks involved in migrating your content away from E-bay and other platforms. They aren't free, but for $230 US dollars, I was able to get all 6900 of my e-bay listings off E-bay and onto Shopify in just a few hours, with minimal errors. All the errors that I did encounter (about 30) were or missing pictures, where it is likely that e-bay lost the pictures in the past several months. Their customer support was amazing - you could call anytime 24/7, or you could live chat online. I did both, and made a new rule for myself, which I have followed religiously for the past 4 weeks:
If it looks like it will take more than an hour to do, STOP and look to see if there is an app that can do it faster, or google what you are trying to do, or call customer support.
You will be amazed at the tools that are available out there. For example, I had decided that I no longer wanted my picture in my listings. I had Rohit, a manager at Shopify, delete them on the import, but then I discovered that some were still present in the listings. But the question now was, which ones? How am I going to check 6,900 listings quickly to see which ones have the offending picture? In the old days, I would have manually edited each listing, which would have taken weeks. Here, I found an app that will export all my inventory detail into an excel CSV file that is specially formatted to be editable, so that the changes can be re-imported to shopify. So using this, I was able to get a list of all the image URL's. But then I had a new problem: how can I tell which URL's are the picture I want to delete?
The old me would simply start copying and pasting each URL into a web page to check which picture it is, for all 23,000 pictures! This would have taken days if not weeks to do. As it turns out, a little google search revealed that you can insert code into excel to run a subroutine that will download the images automatically and put them in the next column on the spreadsheet. The code was shown on a web page and it was simply a matter of hitting Cntrl F11 and then pasting the code in a box and hitting F5 sets the thing in motion. It took just over an hour to run, but at the end of it, I had a spreadsheet with all the images in it. So, then I could go through and delete the rows that had the pictures I wanted to keep, and then what I had leftover, was a spreadsheet containing all the pictures I wanted to delete. I simply changed the image command in one column from "Merge" to "Delete", re-imported it to shopify and poof, all 351 of those offending pictures that Rohit missed were gone! One day to do what would have taken me weeks before.
So, after four weeks of work and having put my blogs on hold to focus 100% on this, I now have a superb website that is fully functional and contains all my E-bay listings. E-bay no longer has power over me. I processed my first order on the website earlier this week. There are a few things that I still have to do of course, but most of these are things that I couldn't even dream of doing with the old site:
- Editing the listings to remove abbreviations from the titles and redundant text that I had to include in order to comply with E-bay's rules.
- Migrating my blog content to the website, so that my customers who want to find the blog, can do so easily and so that my readers will be on my site and can shop there if they so wish.
- Installing multi-language apps to translate the content into every major language, so that the site will be truly international.
- Importing my mailing list and sending out e-mail invites to existing customers to activate their accounts.
So, far from being gone, I am very much back and poised to really hit this business out of the park. One thing that this whole process forced me to do was re-examine my business plan. Up until now, my plan centered around appealing to existing baby boomer collectors by specializing. However, as I developed the websites and looked at the social media aspect, I had an epiphany:
The reason why the hobby's popularity is in decline is because (1) people don't get enough exposure to it, and (2) the collectors the do meet come across as too serious and this puts people off. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that every adult I have talked to about what I do is genuinely interested UP TO A POINT, after which I begin to lose them. That point is generally where I get technical. So, with an entire generation of people on their smartphones, I see a huge opportunity now to market the hobby on social media, by simplifying it and making it less intimidating. At the same time, I can continue to serve my customer base.
So, this realization has made me decide to offer worldwide material, with a specialty in Canada and Nigeria, designed with a heavy emphasis on topical presentation, so that people can just scroll through the pictures on their phones.
For those of you who are curious to see the site, here it is:
It's good to be back!
