26A- Celebrating Failure

Celebrating Failure

Drop shipping 

In order to better understand what failure im celebrating I will start with describing what drop shipping is. Drop shipping is a fulfillment method in which the store does not keep inventory in stock, rather it purchases them from third party seller and have them shipped directly to a a customers home or business.

1) Over this past year I have a had a lot of entrepreneurial ideas. One of them has been the concept to open an online store. I chose the drop ship model because of how relatively inexpensive it is to start. However, that was mistake number one. The money needed to start such a business relies mostly on services, ads & software needed to keep up everything up and running. The mistakes I made were numerous besides a money pit, these include.

• Subscription to Shopify with a domain - This is a mistake because you do not necessarily need to buy a domain on top of the service being provided. I tried to make my website look as profesional as possible but this meant I had less money for other resources

• Drop shipping Chinese products- This is another mistake I believe I made because people usually want their products as soon as possible. When doing this method my sales were incredible lower and a lot of people complained about the time it took to arrive.

• Spending unnecessary amount of money on facebook ads- This is probably one of the biggest mistakes made. If you do not do your research well and know how to use facebook ads the money will disappear very quickly without any return on investments.

• Not dedicating enough time or organization- To have a successful model of drop shipping a person has to constantly monitor and keep track of items to sell. I believe my mistake here was due to not splitting  my time correctly between work classes and the project.

2) Learning experience

The best learning experience I got from this was to do your research. This means a lot of research. One of the things that also stuck the most was time management and a good plan. Throughout this year I have been on and off with this idea, it is not simple task but learning and trying multiple methods have definitively helped on getting some progress done.

3) Failure is very hard, it can bring you down and make you want to quit everything. It is very difficult to accept failure when you believe you have done everything right, but that does not mean to give up. There were many times that I felt frustrated and incapacitated to continue with this project because of the amount of mistakes you make. This class has helped me look at failure in a more reflective and positive way, it has shown me that you have to fail many times in order to succeed. I believe I am more capable of taking risks now because of the current situation of the pandemic, giving me more time to organize and hopefully do better in the future.