Over 40 and trying to learn E-Commerce....

Hello again,

In case you forgot my name is Jonathan and I am the man behind the Magic Bean. Over the last year or so, I have been trying to get this Coffee bean delivery concept up and running. Only problem being, if I am being honest is I can barely use my smart phone and have never done the Social Media thing.  In real life I am a chef and have been working in Destination and World Class Resorts and Hotels for 20 years, I know quality products are paramount, and I know the importance of genuine customer service. What I don't know is Marketing, Social Media, Website Design, Seo Integration, AI generated Contant or Technology in general. But with the world being what it is now, and after realizing another 20 yrs in the hospitality industry will quite literally kill me I decided to give it a shot anyway. I mean what's the worst that can happen? hahahahaha joke was on me, I would like share a little of my experiences so far. 

I would like to start with Amazon Integrations to enable my products to be sold on Amazon. The process starts innocently enough. Step #1 create a seller profile and professional account through amazon. this step was more or less painless it is where Amazon asks you for everything under the sun except a stool sample in order to verify your identity and that you are in fact selling a product people will receive. Although tedious and annoying this step is actually very important and is designed to protect Amazon's credibility and their customers. After 3 weeks or so of uploading this and verifying that the Magic Bean was accepted. We even got a little button in the checkout so people could pay through their amazon account if they ordered from our website. This was supposed to be the hard part, all in all just tedious but no real headaches. Step #2 link store/website inventory to amazon's Database so your product appears on amazon......... This is where the fun begins.  With out boring you with all the details in short, in order to synch your inventory with Amazon you must create a Unique item Skew for Amazons system for each product. Simple enough process just go through your inventory and create a code including a separate code for every product variant (color, size that sort of thing). I sell something like 80ish different items not including color or size variants...... 700 unique, specialty formatted codes later (about 6 weeks of my life in real time) I am finally done and upload my inventory to amazon. 

Only problem being Amazon will not accept my uploaded information. No big deal I probably went all Gen X and forgot to click a button or something. So I reach out to the professionals at Amazon to ask for some guidance. Like everything these days, you can purchase various levels of service each with their own tools to streamline the process, I got the 2nd highest package out of 5 and thought that should be sufficient.  It turns out it didn't matter which package I chose because they didn't respond for almost 2 weeks. When they did respond it was with the gold standard of our day the auto-generated response offering the same answers again and again for problems that do not pertain to the situation. so we play the E-mail game for another 2 weeks while I desperately try to get an actual person to assist me (which I paid for in the package) low and behold finally I get a response from a person and it is the same useful advice that had no relevance before and did not magically solve the problem at hand. Ok super-duper I am 3 months deep now and getting nowhere fast, so I decided to pause Amazon to focus on some marketing and product design. 

Yeah, No. It seems Amazon is not done helping me succeed yet as I soon discovered my website stopped charging shipping for appropriate items and instead defaults to prime shipping a nice little surprise I never signed up for but is included free with the whole integration setup. No big deal I will just change the shipping settings. Wrong again after 3-4 days of checking every detail in my products and webpage I still cannot disable free prime shipping. (again, something I never asked for nor signed up for) So I go to the actual website platform for help. Another 3-4 days of me going through every detail of every product I offer trying to find out where I clicked the wrong button and low and behold, I finally found the answer. To my great surprise I did not go all Gen X and click the wrong thing.

Turns out once I intergraded my website with Amazon it triggered an awesome little feature that is written in the web platform code and is not something you can disable. Apparently, once amazon is linked to my website server platform it automatically includes free amazon shipping to every order. You cannot disable the feature. The only way to remove it is to switch the service that processes orders and payments. As In retooling my entire website to remove Amazon free shipping. Well ok super-duper, it's not like I had already spent months to set it up anyways, right???  Let's just start over again.  Oh and the best part is after 4 months of banging my head against the wall to integrate with Amazon I was never able to upload my inventory to Amazons system because a system bug they later contacted me about... 

So my friends, this is a small sample of the journey of a man that can barely use his computer trying to set up an E-commerce store. I only wasted 4 plus months and had to redesign my website because of a system bug on the world biggest E-commerce platform.  But hey at least I still have a day job and less money by a bunch then when I started lol.  Next time I will try and express the sheer joy of trying to understand social media (for marketing) and the wonderful world of AI. 

Stay strong my friends, remember if you make enough mistakes eventually you learn how to do it right the first time.