Anyone here run their own online business? What was your biggest early mistake?
I've been running my online store for a couple of years now, and looking back, there's honestly a handful of things I wish someone had just told me straight up before I started.
The biggest one? I tried to build and manage everything myself in the beginning—the website, the payment setup, even basic SEO—thinking I'd save money that way. It ended up costing me more in the long run. My site was slow, checkout had issues nobody caught until customers complained, and I lost a good chunk of early sales just because the store didn't feel trustworthy. It took me almost six months to realize the problem wasn't my product; it was the platform underneath it.
Once I actually brought in proper eCommerce development services instead of piecing things together myself, the difference was pretty noticeable: faster load times, a checkout that actually worked smoothly, and way fewer random bugs popping up. I wish I'd done that from day one instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Curious what others ran into early on. Was it more of a marketing mistake, pricing, inventory, or something on the technical/website side like mine?