Few months ago we started a
are we doing something too risky/supid here? want to hear from people with experience ...
The answer to your question is hopefully something you can find yourself by digging into your data.
With a few months of history, there should be some repeat customers. Try to see if there are.
Also, what have you set up in terms of ways to get contacted: chat, mail, phone?
The thing you need to do is:
- get data for all channels: # of contacts per day, # of contacts per category (shipping, prices, other - whatever you want to track)
- have a someone (yourself, employee, VA) create a spreadsheet and see what people are contact you about
At the same time, set up email campaigns with product suggestions. If you have mail chimp, this is very little work.
Check to see how many people / percentage of reorders/
Play around with timing of that mail to see what works best (immediately after purchase, one week, 4 weeks, 6 weeks)
if you do 3-4K sales a day, you'll have enough data/people that will reach out to you in order to determine if the long shipping time is an issue for them or not.
If you do 100-150 sales a day, after a few weeks of running it will become obvious if you get a lot of complaints about shipping or not. Look at the percentages.
And also the fact that you are breaking even is great already. I'd start up mailchimp mailings asap to start making profit on the second sale (no marketing spend!).
In our experience its not an issue for our stores, but we do announce very clearly on the product that shipping will take 2-3 weeks. So they know that upfront when ordering. people dont like (negative) unexpected surprises. Its all about managing expectations.