Stop would be my advice.

Stop giving things to people who can’t be happy for you. Stop also doing non optimal things to help people.

People won’t thank you for it. I did the same for someone years ago only to find out I was being slagged off. I was lording it over people apparently.

I got him a job offshore at £400 a day for unskilled IT labour. Prior to that he was part time minimum wage. I though I was helping and it would feel like the jackpot. I even said I couldn’t manage him as I knew him but would make an intro and leave the rest to him.

It was an eye opening for me.

Your husband will. Never succeed if he keeps putting others head of himself. He is taking £2k away from his family and giving it to someone who is leaving.

Y tho

The price is what the market is willing to pay. How long are you willing to wait to get your money back?

What the seller. Wants should be pretty irrelevant to you.

You aren’t buying stress free income generation here, you will have to work at it. So If it was me I would be looking at 2-4 years ebit.

What I do afterwards to improve the position of the company is none of the sellers concern. If they were able to do it then it would be done.

Don’t let them guilt you into overpaying

Key thing - get your husband on side. Honestly you will need this to survive.

2nd - photographer don’t over think it. You need your clothes on a white background at a minimum. Use pixlr to get the images to look right. It’s a cloud photo editor and you get 3 a day free. I ay £100 per product if it helps to a local photographer.

Can’t afford that? A white tablecloth against a white wall and you’ll get close enough.

You don’t value your product so why should I?

Its as simple as that. Figure out who your target market is and cater to it

I wouldn’t have given the breakdown in price.

I price so that I can offer the service that my business wants to offer. I do a fixed price and it includes lots. I will refer them to a low cost operation if that’s what they want.

Being nickle and dimed by a customer and offering a discount because you want to have the same outcome but extremely different impacts

Yeh the figure needs to be clear. Right now the bottom end of the scale will argue with you to save a few quid because they don’t have it. The top end of the scale will possibly cause issues too. I get paid very well so. 5% for me would be somewhere around £1k.

Having used this service before you need it to feel pricy but not expensive. I paid £300 for the. Mid senior service to give you a reference point but that was many years ago

I feel like you haven’t grasped ROAS.

What if I told you I could get you 500% roas? Sounds awesome right? I can sell 100,000 units of your product a week. Bet you are frothing at the mouth now.

But your margin is 10% and you go out of business in week 1 saddled with huge losses despite being out the door with sales.

Work out your margin (not markup). Divide 100 by your margin I. E 100/10 =10. Then multiple this number by 100 to get your break even roas.

At a 10% margin you need 1001% ROAS to make. Money

Is this a NZ specific issue? I can’t see there being any demand in the UK.

Anyway your page is upside down. You tell me about you at the top and how you are NZ based and you use NZ stuff. That’s great and all but most people don’t care as much as you do.

Move your problem solve to the top. I had no clue what it was until I scrolled down I’m guessing your average engagement is sub 10s right now

This sounds like a terrible idea. As a non vegan I am biased though. I won’t go to a vegan place in the first place for no other reason than if I’m out for dinner it’s because I’m hungry.

Then you have a botanical garden and a farm bolted on. Some will like that but it says expensive. Also botanical gardens or at least the ones I have been to are hot and humid. So you have hot and damp plus smelly (farm) then a food place.

You want to build an expensive hot smelly restaurant that caters to 3.1% of the population. That doesn’t include the vegans that have allergies or made up conditions to one up the other vegans.

Low price for task driven roles. Less attention to detail

Middle price for team lead and manager. Tailored

High price for D level or manager of managers. Fully custom and tailored

Very high price for C suite and up. Discovery, tailored and custom including a cover letter and bio

When I get busy it sometimes takes me 2-3 days to come back to people and I beat myself up about it.

Then I realised the number of businesses that don’t ever return calls.

Cut it off now OP.

That industry is choc full of snake oil types. Outsource some other jobs and do it yourself.

Source : got burnt 4 times as a startup. Spent weeks figuring it out myself, got. My business to 10k/month and then outsourced with an actual budget and the ability to challenge

I started out typing advice but my honest reaction is fold.

You aren’t cut out for this and could potentially kill a young child with your product.

Not doing a QA check on goods you ordered to your design from China isn’t just basic it’s fundamental and has cost you everything this time.

The correct course of action with so many glaring issues on day 1 was to reject the delivery. The corrector action was to hire QA before the goods left mainland China. If the manufacturer was happy to do things like use the wrong colours and materials to get it shipped you could have guessed at the quality of goods.

3 weeks was plenty of time to deal with this. You chose to bury your head.

This is all going to sound really harsh but I’m trying to be on your side OP. Right now you have lost a bit of money (shouldn’t be more than $5k max). If you go ahead and kill a child you’ll lose so much more.

Given your nature is to be non confrontational and let things slide you’ll pay a fortune to get your product fixed and it still won’t be 100%. You don’t even know if it will sell yet and the journey of mastering e-commerce is harder than the YouTube videos make out.

My 2p. Chalk this up to a misadventure

It’s a hard one

As a business owner I don’t do minimum wage so I don’t have a low pay issue.

I do variable pay though on a shared success model. If I (the business) makes a profit and hits our 1 other KPI (5 star ratings) then 20% of profit goes into a bonus pot.

Its hard to say what that pot will be at any time so total comp is hard to work out.

My gut reaction is that I won’t get on with a rule stickler. I need them in very select roles but in general want to be agile and responsive. So anyone that quotes legislation at me is likely to be declined

Also my past experience as a line manager is close to 100% of people who will quote legislation at you become disruptive even when you have 95% retention and a workforce that’s high morale.

The majority of them feel that rules trump outcomes and will try to slow, trip or hinder you in getting there.

I’m not talking about dumping toxic waste in the sea either. Stuff like a project slips and we have to do weekend work. All of my teams are usually happy to take my word that we will sort the right comp out if it was unexpected. These kinds of people will down tools until they have something in writing signed by HR.

You want these kinds of people in legal, finance, safety or other very heavy process roles. You don’t wnat them anywhere near service or operations in my experience.

If you started off so strong and it tapered then fix whatever is wrong with your shopping experience

Word of mouth should mean increased sales over time if the offer is good and experience good

I went through something very similar around 20 years ago and have 2 bits of advice for you.

1. Grieve for it. What you are feeling is totally normal and you should feel it. Don’t be ashamed
2. You cannot pay for the education you just got anywhere else in the world. This sticks with me in everything i do nowadays. I took the lessons i learned from running and being screwed over in business and applied them. I can walk into board level roles and hit the ground running as although my skillset is in tech i can also do margin in my head, commercials, marketing, PR, people management, problem solve and vendor management etc etc etc.

I have a very well paid job and now a side business thats broken through 6 figures and starting to run away order wise.

In a few years pick yourself up and try again. You have the skills to go it alone and dont need a franchise.

It doesnt help right now but set a reminder for 1 year and read point 2 again and come back and tell me i wasnt right.

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Good luck OP

Hey OP

Take it from someone who nearly gave up. Price your service to cover costs and to provide you a living and don’t budge.

You will always get negative people. It’s easy to but you should avoid reacting to one or two people saying they can’t afford your prices. That’s OK, they aren’t your target market.

Make sure you market to people in your demographic. I’m going to guess middle to upper middle class people.

If someone wants to open a budget training4u style service then let them.

I priced too cheap and felt like I was working for nothing. I hiked my prices 6% and nobody batted an eyelid, while I’m not huge I’m turning over about. 1500aud a day (I’m in the UK so roughly). I feel like I’m on a runaway train now but the first year was making mistakes and learning how to market.

You got this