Celebrating Failure (Assignment 26A)

This past semester, I began to pursue a drop shipping venture. Drop shipping is an e-commerce business model that sells products from China across the world using social media advertisement. The seller creates an online store through a company like Shopify, and finds a supplier in China to fulfill orders for you. The seller never sees the products that he or she is selling in person, if he or she does not want to. To begin, I started this venture by designing a website, purchasing my domain name, and finding products to sell. Once that was complete, I set up a Facebook ads account in order to begin advertising. Facebook ads is a very complex and tricky software, but has the potential to make the sellers very successful. I began to create my ad copies, pick my target audience, and the interests that I believed would sell my products. I set my daily budget for Facebook to use, and began to watch the advertisements roll out. After three days of waiting, my ads had not delivered any sales, and I began to become disappointed. I believed that I had hit my target audience exactly right, but I still was not converting any sales. The next day, I stopped my original ads, and began to re-target my audience and its interest groups. These ads delivered a few more sales, but I was still earning a negative profit. Finally, I decided to switch my interest groups once more, and began to finally see results. In two weeks, I had generated over $1500 in revenue, and began to turn a profit.  Overall, I learned that persistence is key in business, and that you cannot give up. I did not receive the results I wanted at first, but kept trying to convert sales. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally began to see the revenue that I was looking for.

I think that failure is one of the hardest things in business. I believe that it is the biggest deterrent for people that want to start a business. Failure is the one of the biggest things that closes businesses, and even prevents some from ever starting. I believe that I handle failure pretty hard, but I do not give up. I always begin to analyze why I think I failed, and look around to see what others are doing that works for them. This class has not really changed my perspective on failure to be honest. I have failed many times before in previous things within my life, and I think I have just learned how to overcome it as I have grown up.