An e-commerce founder hit $1 million in revenue last month, then Shopify froze his payouts due to chargebacks from scaling too fast. He shares how he got through the cash crunch and why every seller needs backup plans for payment processors and suppliers.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. Hello, Guys. I don't know if you guys saw LeBron over there, but he is my sunshine. So what? Not talking to you. We're in Hawaii right now, and I know if you guys watch the live streams, you guys would know that. But, you know, I'm just realizing I'm holding my camera over a ledge. Okay, I need to stop doing that. But I wanted to give kind of like a raw update about some things that have been happening this week and, you know, let you guys know that, you know, E. Com and doing E. Comm, even when things are going well, things can go bad. So this week. So last month, right, let's take it back to last month, we did over a million dollars in revenue. And that's great. Like, you're pushing a lot of volume, getting a lot of orders, but there also can be a lot of downsides to doing a lot of volume. So one of them, you get more chargebacks, right? Like, you're always gonna get chargebacks no matter what. No matter how fast you fulfill or anything, you're always gonna get chargebacks no matter how good your team is. And so once you start scaling up like that, the next month is always gonna. That's when those chargebacks are gonna start to hit, right? Because they don'. Like, they order, if that makes sense. It's, you know, after those, like, 15 days that they expect the order to get there. That's when the chargebacks are gonna happen. So whenever you're really pushing volume, you know, usually like 30 days past that, you'll get an influx of chargebacks. And that's kind of what happened to our store. And so on January 5th, I'm filming this. I don't know, it's like the 9th or something. January 5th, Shopify completely put our payouts on hold. So for the past, like, six days, five days or whatever, I have not single payout from Shopify. So I've still been trying to run ads because I want the store to continue to keep up its momentum and things like that. But we've kind of had to scale down very significantly just to be able to manage cash flow and stuff because of this Shopify hold. And E Comm is not all sunshine and rainbows. I just want to be transparent with you guys. Things happen. Things like this are kind of in inevitable, especially with the Shopify payments. Usually you run into a situation like this and. Yeah, man, like this morning, I was like, really? Honestly, I was kind of stressed out about it, but I legitimately just, like, prayed, and I was like, God, please, you know, I know you're gonna take care of me, and I trust you. And then literally, I got an email this morning, and they release the old. So now we're chilling, guys. Now we're good. We're gonna be back to scaling, hopefully back to, you know, doing some decent days here. But, you know, just want to be trans. Like, things like this happen. You know, once you get a product winning, like, once you get a store running that's really profitable, like, you gotta make sure that you're taking care of the whole business. Like, everything. You gotta have backup plans in place just in case, like, a payment provider goes down or a supplier can't fulfill orders or something like that. You gotta make sure that you have everything dialed in, dialed out. It's not just like it's an actual business, right? There's a lot of money on the line. There's a lot of things that can go wrong. So as long as you're, like, diligent and you try to get ahead of things, then you should be fine. But, you know, things like this happen. So just wanted to give a quick update. Try to be athletic with you guys like always. And. Yeah, man, we're in Hawaii. There's a big old mountain over there. Pretty sure it's like some sort of crater, I believe. But, yeah, I just wanted to give you guys a quick update. I have been filming a lot during this trip, so I'll post, like, a video about it with more videos and pictures, and when I get back to my. My hometown. So this weekend, hopefully I'll get that. That video out for you guys. But yeah, so just, you know, keep in mind, things like this happen. Just wanted to talk it out on here and be transparent. So, you know, ecom is not always sunshine and rainbows, but, you know, we're still moving on and it's part of the game. So thank you guys for watching and peace out.
