This is week 3 by my estimation and there hasn't been a lot of positive input or growth so far.
I assume it takes time to build an audience and get people on your side, but so far it feels a little like pushing 15 boulders up a hill and watching them all rip your face to shreds.
I have not made any sales this week, so I am still at 4 in total.
My profit has reduced to -$2.42 as I had not factored in the "international bank fee" per transaction to Printful for fulfilment. This has so far been another $7.00 I had not foreseen. I also did another couple of days of ads on Facebook for $3.00 per day which led to me having 6 clicks on my site. Also my Canva subscription charged for the month and I had marked it down for the next day; I was hoping to avoid the extra $20.00.
I am keeping a spreadsheet of all the costs/sales involved and maybe one day I can release them monthly for people to see if there is enough interest.
The charge for my Shopify account of $55 will be on 5th May, so that will set me back significantly without any further sales.
I created a TikTok account and initially I started it as a business profile, I discovered you couldn't really use any popular or trending songs for your videos (commercial license etc etc), so I switched it back so I could use some Taylor Swift songs on the stickers I made for her newly released album. TikTok has been a nightmare to use. I have been given a warning already because of one of the images I created had a gallow in it - but that is in the song, so I tried to appeal and got slapped with a self harm warning. <shakes head>
Instagram and Facebook have been doing very little for me in terms of sessions or reach - even with paying for ads. I have had a total of 790 sessions on the site so far since it went live.
I know my store is sort of niche but ultimately I am not sure this is something I can maintain without sales. I had hoped a few here and there would start trickling at this stage in which would offset the costs of the Shopify plan but this seems unlikely.
The reason this is an issue at all is because I am considering switching all my products to Printify - they have cheaper production costs - however everything is in USD which is frustrating. It would take a mammoth effort to have to migrate all my products and set up new products if I am not seeing sales, the counter being - would I see more sales if the production costs were lower therefore I could charge less.
As it stands I am only make $2 per sticker at the large size and some of the more expensive items on the shop about $5 - $8 after shipping and costs come out.
Anyway that's the update for the week, going to add some more designs in the next few days and just continue to push the socials.