Yes I niched myself much smaller than I wanted too. I wanted to do gift boxes for all ages but when I was doing inventory I just hyper focused on baby stuff and spent all the money I had allotted on baby items so I said eh I guess that’s what I’m doing now

I do put in those hours pretty consistently

Thanks so much for the suggestions. I sell baby and children’s items. I originally wanted to only do gift boxes and to do them for all ages. But I kind of niched myself into babies with the money I spent on the items. And then when the boxes weren’t selling I thought, okay I need to sell things individually. Which still isn’t really working out lol. And I did study what I thought were my competitors but they’re successful and I’m not so I guess I studied the wrong people lol. I was hoping to make like 1-2k a month and thought if it gets a little bigger, great! But I don’t need 6 figures level. I thought I would at least be able to start paying off my credit card but I’ve only made like $300 in sales through those items. I did also think that I would even be busy enough during q4 that I would hire someone to help me package orders and such. Lolz.

Thank you for your insights on what to do next. You always hear about everyone blowing up on TikTok and their stores going crazy. But I know that’s nothing to rely on and you DONT hear about all the people that didn’t happen to. I do really need to put myself into my local market more.

Thank you so much for the helpful tips. I definitely think it’s a case of expectation vs reality. I studied competitors including the amount of sales they were making and their margins and thought it would be easy to at the very least make my money back if not more than that. However I’ve spent about 10k and have maybe made $300 in sales so I was just blindsided. And the thing that’s really pushing it to the front of my mind is not being able to pay off my cc before I have to start paying interest. And yes I can borrow the money from my husband (we’d have to pull from assets) or family or even open a new 0% Apr credit card and pay a 3% balance transfer - which is what I’ll likely end up doing as I still have good credit. But not meeting that marker of paying off the credit card when I really really thought I was going to is killer. I have tried the gratitude journal before but it didn’t stick. I should look into that again. I really do want to be positive about all this. I know I haven’t failed until I quit but dang it’s hard right now. I might take you up on that dm offer. Thanks so much!

Totally get that and that is why I was pricing myself higher but I wasn’t getting sales that way either lol. Also I have a 4.9 for reviews. And going against that line of thinking - recently in my due date group a mom posted a “deal” of where those super trendy hand embroidered sweaters were going for like $20 which included free international shipping. Very clearly a scam - but the person had 75 sales in the last couple of weeks that they opened. So something that was very clearly too good to be true still got a lot sales. I thought my items were good quality and main stream while still being a little different enough to set me apart from those selling similar items, but maybe I’m wrong. I would love to get to the bottom of why I suck and I even know some reasons already. The issue is that I need to get over the fact that I suck because it’s really just making me depressed when my life is pretty good.