Most stories you hear from entrepreneurs are success stories.

But entrepreneurs fail a lot too.

Here is one of those stories.

Chapter 1: The lure of the tangible

About a year into my digital products shop, it was going well and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to sell physical products too? To see my work in a tangible, physical form… How cool would that be?!

So I did what any good Etsy seller would do and I started a print-on-demand (POD) shop using Printify.

It was a bit slow, but I did get some sales and even positive reviews.

Chapter 2: The problem

I didn’t fully realise it at the time, but this shop was a great cause of stress for me.

The biggest problem was quality control. I had ordered a few samples which looked ok, but I never knew what my customers would be getting.

Customers came to me with problems with misprints and incorrect sizing. Printify was good at correcting their errors and sending a replacement, but the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

There were also problems with shipping and customers asking me where their order was. I had to deal with that too.

In about 50 orders, I think maybe 10 had issues outside my control and nothing to do with the quality of my designs. That’s a very high rate!

So I paused my shop to reconsider my options (and for some respite from the complaints!).

Chapter 3: A new hope

I did more research and heard that Printful seemed to have a good reputation for quality.

I decided to focus on a single product type which had sold the most. I ordered samples from Printful and was much happier with the quality.

But it was still really hard to match the colours from my designs to the actual product, so that I could make accurate mockups. Actually the colours were further off than they were with Printify, but the fabric quality was much nicer.

I decided I would just order every single design (in a patchwork-style sample) and then manually colour-correct my mockups based on those.

This turned out to be a bad decision.

Chapter 4: A slow death

My revamped shop was looking great and I was happier with my products, but my sales slowed right down (people preferred the poorer quality products?).

Printful’s prices were higher, so I needed to raise my prices too.

I think this was a problem.

The sales came in very slowly, while at the same time my new workflow was slow, tedious and expensive.

I wasn’t enjoying working on this shop, and I was questioning if it was worth continuing.

I reached out to a mentor and explained the situation. She told me to focus on what was serving me, my digital products shop.

She told me exactly what I wanted to hear, actually.

I closed the shop once again. To this day I dread selling physical products ever again.

Yet after all this time and effort, I didn’t feel like a failure. Am I delusional? Why not?

Chapter 5: The reckoning

I have come to accept that my strengths and weaknesses lie in certain areas.

But I don’t know what they are until I try.

I’ve seen successful POD shops with quite a few negative reviews that the seller appears to ignore. I think some sellers take these in their stride and keep going anyway.

I really hate getting negative reviews, and the stress of not knowing if a customer’s order was going to arrive on time, and in the right size, and well-printed, was too much for me.

I made the decision to stop that shop because I realised it wasn’t for me.

I had given it a year (on and off), and then called it.

But it’s hard to know whether to “keep going” (as I tell everyone in our Etsy Digital Seller community all the time!) or to call it a day. How do you decide?

Epilogue

If you’re finding yourself in a similar situation, I can sympathise as it’s not easy to make that decision. But you really need to look at all the facts and commit: keep going or stop.

While sunk cost fallacy starts to rear its ugly head the longer you’ve been trying something, I think you will feel comforted by knowing that you spent enough time and gave it your best.

On Etsy, I would say you need a minimum of 6 months to a year to know if your shop is going to work out.

So if you’re struggling to make sales or just not enjoying yourself, give it time and experiment. Try and make it fun.

But if you decide to quit, don’t beat yourself up.

This is all part of being an entrepreneur.