Welcome to our first blog adventure!
My husband and I have wanted to start our own business for many years. Part of the problem initially was we didn't know exactly what we wanted to do or how to go about starting one. We started off trying to be independent contractors for a few call centers. Those didn't work out so well.
We really didn't get to choose our own hours and didn't have control over our income amount since all of them were hourly wages with a few incentive commissions that weren't worthwhile. We really didn't have much freedom as we wanted nor making as much money as we expected. In fact, the money was just barely allowing us to survive.
After a while of doing the independent contractor route, we ended up going back into mainstream workforce working retail. We hadn't given up on our yearning to own our own business as we know that retirement will be hard otherwise. So we researched some more options and at one point we did try a turnkey adult porn website offer.
The turnkey porn site didn't do well because there was so much saturation of free porn out there and competition such as youporn and pornhub. Again, we took a break and researched off and on for ideas. We didn't want a brick and mortar store because the costs would eat too much into profits with the need for the lease, utilities, inventory and all that overhead.
Around sometime in June of 2020, as COVID-19 was wreaking havoc on our country, we came across an idea. We asked ourselves things like: What kind of products or service do we want to sell? What will have a constant need? What could we do that is online only? Would we be able to provide product without having to have physical inventory on hand?
We know some things are certain in our lives such as taxes, death, food, water, happiness and so on. My husband and I started thinking along these lines. He looked into franchises with adam & eve and a few other known adult toy stores but none of them offered a web only presence option. That is when he started learning about wholesale distributors.
We then came across another turnkey operation for adult sex toys this time. This is where the fun begins. It started off reading like a great idea. They'd provide the webhosting as well as dropship the products directly to our customers. It was a little pricy for our budget to start, about $200 for the first month and then $80 a month thereafter with no contract.
It almost sounded too good to be true. As I said, this is where the fun began. We got our own domain name and sent the info to this turnkey host. It took them a week after our initial payment to get us set up using Prestashop for the CMS. So now there are just 3 weeks left until our next month's payment of $80 is due.
My husband is the tech junkie and knows way much more about web design than I ever will in my entire life. He setup all the admin stuff for the cPanel access and the Prestashop admin area. He started looking around to familiarize himself with Prestashop. What we were installed with was a 38 build old version with very basic addons. The theme choices were poor and really no customization options without coding a lot of CSS as most other non-free themes started off around $70 or more.
He tried upgrading the CMS version but it wouldn't update. He reached out to our customer support and it took them three days to respond back to him when he asked why he couldn't upgrade the version. Their response was basically "we plan to update the version soon but with COVID-19, we haven't been able to do so yet." This started setting off alarms in my husband's head he said. Then on one Friday he was trying to access the backend of the site to upload a theme using the FTP info in the FTP software he was recommended to use by this company. It ended up blocking our IP from their servers because of their security software.
He put in another ticket because this theme also ended up breaking the site and he had no access now to try fixing it with a backup. It wasn't until Tuesday that he even got a response from their tech support, by the same guy in each ticket! They wanted his IP address so they could unblock him. He sent it and waited several hours to get a response letting him know he could get back in again. The site was still broken and unrecoverable by our end even though we tried using our backup file.
My husband responds to their ticket again saying that he could not get the backup to work. Two days pass before they even reply. They ask him to send the backup to them and they will try. He tried attaching it to the ticket but their ticket system wouldn't allow any files to be sent! Later that day, they said they will get to work on trying to reset the software. A day passes and they respond that they couldn't get it restored and would have to do a reinstall from scratch. Four days pass and finally we get access again.
My husband goes back in and sets up all the links and item categories again as well as our social media contacts. He finds a few missing images and decides he will add them to the site himself using the ftp software. He attempts to log in one time and it tells him it can't access the server. He finds out that once more, our IP gets blocked by their security software. This means he can't access their tech support, our account on their wholesale site to send orders or anything hosted on their servers.
So he looks up how to use a proxy so he can submit a ticket, once more. Guess what? It's the weekend so we don't get any response until Monday. At this point my husband has become frustrated and starts pointing out that it seems to be a one person operation because the same person in all the emails from original purchase to the tech support responses have been by one person.
My husband tells me that he thinks we are being dragged along and we decide to cancel before the next billing date coming up in 3 days. He submits another ticket to cancel stating the reasons why with all the blocked access, themes built for prestashop not working and the outdated version of prestashop being forced to use.
My husband at this juncture has already been looking into wholesale distributors for adult sex toys and found out more about what places will allow adult hosting. Some of them are costly except Hostgator. He also read up on Prestashop and discovered Shopify. We weighed the pros and cons of getting a host and installing Prestashop (which he didn't really like) versus using Shopify. We decided on Shopify because the hosting was included as well as had free themes that were highly customizable and didn't have all those expensive addons for a small company.
So this is where we are at now. We found a great wholesale distributor that doesn't cost an arm and a leg for quality products as well as they drop ship for us for a nominal fee. With over 13,000 products in their inventory, we have a variety of items to offer our customers now.
We love our domain name of VIPNovelTease.com which my husband came up with after we spend several days trying to come up with one. He was able to make the site look very classy and easy to shop. Most importantly, we don't have a huge overhead and can put money into advertising more once we start getting traffic and sales.
So we basically paid for a learning lesson. Now that I have spent a lot of time writing this and sharing it with you, I hope you have found it insightful.
We hope that you drop by our business website and find something you need or want. We do offer a loyalty rewards program and plan on adding some more savings opportunities in the near future.
Next time, we plan on talking a little about advertising an adult site in our next blog. Until then, be sure to please your VIP with VIP NovelTease even if it happens to be yourself!
