Websites are easy... secure stores are not

It’s a good idea to go slow and test before making a large marketing push. I am on the verge of a marketing push right now, since it’s already SPOOKY season. Before you know it, people will be purchasing a gift for someone they don’t know a lot about, except maybe they like plants. I want to be ready for that. I fear I am not.

CRAWL, WALK, RUN

I launched my website to little fanfare. Thankfully. The product has been an idea in my head for more than 10 years. It was 8 years ago that I finally prototyped it, and just a few weeks ago I got my first real shipment in. I’m not in a rush. Luckily. I just found ANOTHER website issue that could have been a real problem if I was popular. It turns out that just about anyone could have edited or deleted my website. Every page was vulnerable. Everyone had access to the FAQs, products, prices, testimonials, gallery images and page text without signing in. The database had "allow everyone" rules on most tables, and I was sending the public key to every visitor's browser. That’s BAD!

YOU GOTTA CREEP, CREEP

It will be prudent of me to continue slow rolling my product marketing push. I have decided to do another round of “soft marketing” with friends and neighbors. I need to make sure the website stays up if more than 1 person visits. I need to make sure if, and most likely when, the store doesn’t work, it’s a friend who tells me about it, and not a troll. I need to make sure a competitor can’t just delete my entire website any time they want. I didn’t even know I needed that last one until now. I wonder what other pitfalls await.

OH YEAH, REMEMBER SHIPPING?

In my effort to rid Plant Spinner of as much plastic packaging as possible, somehow I forgot about packaging tape. I got rid of shipping plastic everywhere else except for the outermost layer and the first thing you see when you get a box. Well, they make paper packaging tape now too, so now I have that!