I won't even lie to you, this blog is an attempt to boost SEO. But I thought making a blog might also offer some insight to the back end of the business. And it's exhausting 😅 but definitely in a good way.
We're in the early stages of this project and working out a lot of kinks. The first and greatest of which so far has been trying to pull this off with two young kids during summer break. Coming home from my day job and maintaining enough gas in the tank to troubleshoot technical problems with the site/systems has been a challenge but I'm enjoying it.
Kristin's obviously in charge of the design and visuals. I've been mainly working on the less glamorous aspects. Linking sales channels like Meta and Tiktok (which are about as convoluted as it gets), taxes, cost unit analysis, social media analytics, site navigation and widgets and the list goes on.
We have a day-to-day list of things we need to tweak or work on - which never stops growing - as well as a few big projects we'd like to tackle. Things like product expansion and local markets. It's really funny to me how much work goes into things that appear seemingly effortless on the outside.
Out of all the things I wasn't expecting, so far the most surprising has to be the bots. Kristin is getting blown up on Facebook specifically by profiles that are clearly automatic or trying to sell us a service that we either aren't ready to pursue or aren't interested in. The automated market that exists to make money off of people trying to make money is really funny to me.
My current development projects are creating a frictionless shopping experience for the business on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok. Meta doesn't seem to want to play ball with us for reasons I'm not able to discern at the moment. Apparently the store review process can take months. As far as TikTok is concerned, I'm waiting for some documentation to come in. TikTok Sellers requires an EIN (which baffles me, as the store is set up as a sole proprietorship and technically employs no one) and even though I've successfully applied for the EIN, I chose the snail mail option to get the number since the IRS portal requires an Adobe plugin that I didn't want which also comes with McAfee and McAfee will never touch any of my machines for as long as I live 😂
So with any luck the TikTok shop should be up in about three weeks and I'm still in limbo with Meta. I'll post any updates and encourage Kristin to do the same. Thank you all for the support and reviews. I'm really looking forward to seeing what this can evolve into.
-Trey