The Day I Took My Own Store Hostage

My online store didn't have a shopping cart. You could buy a Plant Spinner, but if you wanted two, you had to pay for it twice, separately. Genuinely embarrassing but also funny that it took this long for me to notice. So, I set out to fix that. Add a cart. Let people buy more than one thing like a normal store. Simple!

How it started:

I added my shopping cart and thought "let me also upgrade security while I'm at it." Bad idea. I broke my Stripe checkout. Now, instead of a "store that can't sell you two of something," I had a "store that cannot sell you anything, at all." Impressive downgrade.

Meanwhile....

While all of that was happening, a second, unrelated crisis was quietly building in the background: I'd been uploading a lot of product pictures and videos, (people want to see the thing actually spin) and that adds up. Too many images, too much traffic, too much data being transferred back and forth, and the free storage service I was using for all my media hit its limit and just... shut down. Blocked. No more image delivery unless I upgrade to a paid plan (which I had to do). On top of nobody being able to check out, they couldn't see a picture of what they'd be checking out. Blank spaces where product photos should be. Now I had a store that neither showed you the product nor let you buy it. A truly complete experience, in the worst possible way.

AI to the rescue!?

Good news: the store's back up. Checkout works. Images are loading (I found a new way to host pictures). Plant Spinner can once again be seen and purchased, all at the same time. I found out the site was broken because I checked it myself. I wanted to see if the updates worked, and found a missing payment process. AI didn't catch the Stripe misconfiguration because it didn’t care to check if the updates it added broke anything that previously worked. No error alert. No email. My site could be down for hours before I happen to poke around.

Lessons hopefully learned

I need to continue checking my website, but I can't be online all day, so I need to consider some actual uptime monitoring. I will set up a service that pings my site regularly and texts or emails me the second something's down. I also need to remind my AI website builder to double check its work; perhaps I can add it as a skill so it remembers.

Oh, but what about shipping?

Now that I can sell more than just one thing, I might need to ship more than one thing. I’ve only had to ship single units, and since they were mostly for friends and family, the shipping container did not matter much. I chose the cheapest thing possible with bubble mailers, but bubble mailers can rip or tear open, and their contents can get smooshed (I never followed up with anyone about that). So I need boxes now. I also care about the environment, and I'd bet most people buying a plant product do too, so I landed on cardboard boxes. They are cheap, available in all sizes, endlessly recyclable, and tried and true. I also found out that substituting honeycomb paper for bubble wrap is not a big price difference, so I gotta buy that. A hundred bucks lighter today, but now I have a real bundle-shipping setup and a slightly cleaner conscience to show for it. Onward!