The Christmas season is when you regret not fixing known problems and discover new weak points in your ecommerce operation. I say discover because they are always there, but the pressure caused by high order volume makes the weak points more obvious and thus you “discover” that what you thought wasn’t a big deal can be a real problem.
This year we discovered that our home grown software will every once in a while miss pulling an order from our Shopify store. We actually knew it happened 2 times before, but it’s much more prevalent at higher order volume. So now we will build in a system to check that we don’t miss any shopify orders sequentially.
We have also discovered that one of our most important suppliers is completely unreliable during the holidays. Unfortunately there’s not much I can do about it because we don’t have the kind of purchasing power to push our weight around. I plan on having talks with them but I’m not sure what I can do about that.
There are some others issues we’ve known about, mainly that our system should do a better job of notifying us when things aren’t going as we expect. This can be fixed with software but we didn’t get it done in time for the holiday.
Finally there are the errors that we have zero control over. This would be shipping issues, a vendor sending the wrong shirt or a shirt that has a flaw, etc. Doesn’t matter that these weren’t our fault, we need to make it right with the customer.
So the point here is that things always go wrong in ecommerce (really in any business). Better businesses are better prepared and have less go wrong, but something will always go wrong. And that’s why you need some margin for error. And ironically enough the best way to have margin for error is to have high gross margins. If I have to send a package next day air and it costs me $40 and I only make $10 on an order that just wiped out 4 orders worth of profit. Not good.
So when our customers ask us why our tees cost so much I guess I should start mentioning some percentage of the costs that goes to our “margin for error”. Because it’s going to cost you whether you plan for it or not.