Today Google Analytics called me out: not all of my products are indexed properly. For anyone hoping her work gets discovered by actual shoppers, that's the whole problem in one line — unindexed products can't be found. A beautiful boutique with the door still locked.
There's a potential fix: export the product catalog as a CSV and make the corrections in bulk. There's also a real chance I break something in the process — not the site itself, probably, but I genuinely don't know, and that's the part I'm sitting with. Backend work is not where I live. I'm a designer at heart; I'd rather be refining the layout or sketching more cats than staring at rows of data. But there's no one else here to do it, so it goes on the list — right next to the longer list titled "tasks to outsource one day."
The brighter news: the Black Friday sale is live. Thirty percent off everything in the shop, and free shipping on orders over $100. The free shipping eats into the margins, and I'm fairly sure I did the math right. Fairly. Math is also not where I live.
What I keep noticing is that the parts of this business I like least — pricing, indexing, spreadsheets — are the parts that make the parts I love possible. Neglect the backend and the artwork never gets found, no matter how good it is. So I'll keep tinkering, and keep making notes for Future Me about what to hand off when the sales reach the thousands. When that day comes, I know exactly where the reclaimed hours go: the cats.
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