Failure Friday: "I had to issue refunds and cancel 50 orders…"

Today's short story features MacKenzie from Vancouver, Canada. As you'll hear, she has a successful Shopify store selling party favors and a few other things. Most of the time, the business operates quite nicely. But one day … well, you'll hear it from her.

This is MacKenzie 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—and that's where I ran into trouble.

This is a highly seasonal business, but different from others because the seasons aren't always predictable. We do sell a lot for Halloween and Christmas, but we also see spikes whenever there's a big convention coming to town.

Anyway, my Shopify store allows me to set real-time inventory of products. I have it connected to our fulfillment center, so that what's on the site matches what's actually on hand.

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 I'd set up on my computer would "chime" with a sale. When I saw orders taking off, I went into the backend and changed some settings to more prominently feature the products that were selling like hotcakes.

So far so good, but I ended up changing something else inadvertently. 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 ticking this option without realizing it. Then I took the rest of the afternoon off, since I'd promised my daughter I'd attend her dance recital.

Orders kept coming in, thanks in part to our 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, we have a backup plan. We can't get our hands on new product right away, but we'll suggest substitutes for whatever someone wanted to buy. At least 50% of the time, they end up buying the suggested item, so that works out well.

Except ... in this case, because the inventory setting had been changed, customers continued to purchase sold-out items. I 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'd planned on receiving their items for a hard deadline.

This mistake cost me several thousand dollars in sales. 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.