So I was under the impression that hubby had the whole website thing under control, and the time he was spending in front of the pc led me to think that it must be close to being finished. Wrong on both counts.

He informed me that he’d designed most of the pages and processed my pictures into usable images, but there was a few things we still had to work on. We hadn’t considered how we were going to get the nappy cakes delivered and although we had prices worked out, we had no idea how people were going to pay us! So to sum it up, we had products we couldn’t sell or deliver, great.

Again, being a small business is a huge hurdle for getting a reasonably priced delivery service. Most of the larger companies require that you have a minimum number of deliveries per day before they will provide their service. Hopefully one day we’ll meet their minimum quotas, but as a brand new business there is no way we could commit to anything like that. We knew it was possible that we wouldn’t sell a single thing in the first few weeks.

We eventually found a courier company that would do the types of deliveries we needed (hospitals, private residences, etc) and although they did have a minimum purchase amount (20 prepaid delivery labels) there was no minimum number of deliveries to meet. It’s great to at least be able to offer delivery now, but the low volume rate is substantially higher than normal rates and we are taking a loss on delivery at the moment. The plan is to increase sales until we can take advantage of the higher volume rates,

It seems in almost every aspect of starting a small business that the costs are enormous compared to larger businesses, who can afford to run lower profit margins, so to compete with them we have to virtually give our stuff away. We’re still looking at the big picture though – profits are surely in our future, at some point, maybe…

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