This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hello and welcome. We're listening to Side Hustle School, the daily podcast on making extra money without quitting your job. And also, this is our weekly segment. It comes out every Friday. It's called Failure Friday.
It's all about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure, all of the things that go wrong. Now, of course, we're all about case studies and success stories here on the podcast, hearing great reports from listeners who are making money and starting new projects, growing their business, sometimes going full-time, all those good things. But something I started hearing a couple of years ago was people wanna know more about what doesn't work well. So that's how we started this new segment series, and it's been very popular. So I just kinda like to get out of the way, let the Side Hustler tell her story, his or her story.
And today's short story features McKinsey from Vancouver, Canada. As you'll hear, she has a successful Shopify store selling party favors and a few other things. And most of the time, this just goes on quite nicely. Like the business is successful, it works, you know? Everything is good.
But of course, today is our Failure Friday theme, so you're not gonna hear about the successes, you're gonna hear about something that goes wrong. All right, so let's let McKinsey tell the story. Over to her. [Music]
This is McKinsey in Vancouver. I have an online shop that sells party favors, signs, and promotional products.
Most of our business is B2B, but we also do consumer sales, so it's a nice mix. This is a highly seasonal business, but in a different way from others because the seasons aren't always predictable. We sell lots for Halloween and Christmas, but we also see spikes whenever there's a big convention coming to town. Sometimes it's one we've never even heard of and don't know anything about until a bunch of orders are coming in. Anyways, my Shopify store allows me to set up a real-time inventory of products.
I have it connected to our fulfillment center so that what's on site actually matches what's on hand. This prevents any big mismatches between sales and inventory. At least it's supposed to. One day we were in the midst of a big sales spike for several different products. It was great.
All day long, the order sound it set up on my computer would chime with the sale. I even thought about turning it off for the first time ever, but decided to let it keep going. I'm not so jaded yet that I'm gonna complain about getting paid. When I saw orders taking off, I went into the backend system and changed some settings to more prominently feature the products that were selling like hotcakes. Unfortunately, I ended up changing something else by mistake.
And even though there's the fancy setup between Shopify and my fulfillment center, there's also an option to bypass this connection. I was probably just excited and going too quickly, but for some reason I ended up taking this option without realizing it. Then I took the rest of the afternoon off since I promised my daughter I'd attend her dance recital. Orders kept coming in thanks in part to our good search engine rankings and an especially big convention that was coming to town. Unfortunately, however, we received too many orders and were quickly sold out.
Normally in that case, I have a backup plan. We can't get our hands on new products right away, but we'll suggest substitutes for whatever someone wants to buy. At least 50% of the time, they end up buying the suggested items so that works out pretty well. Except in this case, because the inventory setting had been changed, customers continued to purchase the sold out items. I ended up having late night and didn't realize the problem until the next morning.
Long story short, I had to issue a lot of refunds and cancel more than 50 orders. Then of course, several people were disappointed because they plan on receiving their items for a hard deadline. This mistake cost me several thousand dollars in sales and of course the goodwill from all those failed orders. Oops. It also came with an obvious lesson.
Be careful to double check those critical settings and also be careful about changing horses in midstream or any of those important settings in the midst of a sales frenzy. Thanks for the show, Chris and team. I look forward to learning more and I hope someone else can learn from my mistake. [Music]
You know, most of these stories that I end up sharing on failure Friday, when I work on them, I realize like, oh, I have made the same mistake at some point in my 20 years of experience of selling stuff online, starting various ventures and things. I've either made exactly the same mistake, like when we had an episode recently about somebody who sent out a launch email, like for a product launch and then they disappeared for a couple of days.
They just didn't check their email. They realized they'd made a huge mistake in the order link. I was like, man, I have done exactly that. And so listening to Mackenzie's story, I'm like, okay, I haven't done exactly this, not exactly the same setting mistake in my order panel, but I've done things like this many times, not just once, unfortunately. It'd be a whole series of Chris Guillebeau failure stories, but you know, I just kind of keep going.
That's my whole mantra, or I guess if there's any secrets to whatever success I've had, it's just keep going. So the theme of failure Friday is never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. Sounds like Mackenzie learned a lesson there. Take the lesson to heart, listeners, keep your eye on those settings, especially when you're changing something in the middle of something, like the middle of a product launch or in the middle of a sales spike as she was experiencing. But of course it also seems she has recovered well.
So well done, Mackenzie, well done, listeners. Thanks for being out there. You've got a question, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what you're up to. Today's show notes, sidehustleschool.com/2092.
2092. We are coming up on episode 2100. And of course we keep rolling every single day a new episode. I hope you'll keep listening. My name's Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School.
[Music]
From the Onward Project.
