Be Flexible in Business

I hope that y'all don't mind the stream of consciousness posts that I seem to be posting.

I really do want to share what I am learning as I'm grow as a small business owner. Sometimes that growth is in my mindset. I used to be very rigid and when I made a decision about how something was supposed to move along, it was very very difficult for me to accept when it wasn't working the way I envisioned it to work.

For instance, take my website. I started on Wix. Which is pretty and easy. But they didn't have the shopping cart features that I needed for selling mums. I wanted the experience to be easy for all of us, NOT send tons of emails back and forth to get it just right. So, I transitioned to Wordpress. As a long-time blogger, I am familiar and comfortable with Wordpress. I am neither familiar, nor comfortable with WooCommerce, the standard Wordpress storefront. I finally discovered Ecwid and could plug it into my WP site. It worked like a dream! Sadly, it's not pretty. And I disabled it when I wasn't selling anything. I cannot go in the hole $15 every month. And I switched themes to a WooCommerce theme, because it, essentially is free. The shopping cart feature that I needed for mums was only $49. What I didn't realize was that was per year. So the license ran out and I am stuck with a non-functioning shopping cart again. Which is fine, because my dot com is getting zero traffic. It's a hot mess.

I made a decision last week. For $150 a year, I can use the Ecwid shopping cart and not think about it monthly. I will have to deal with functionality over pretty in more creative ways. I decided to pack my lunch to work for two weeks and take the money I save to pay for the shopping cart.

Owning a business means sacrifices. Sometimes in ways that you did not expect. Like packing your lunch when you work in a grocery store. And the biggest lesson is to be flexible. Don't keep pounding away at something that obviously is not working for you.

So now, I am off to fix my website once again. To remove WooCommerce and go back to the drag and drop theme that I liked and get it ready to plug Ecwid back in.