[Liongadev]

You should have added some text point to your website in that hot linked image. If they are hotlinking your stuff its ok to put some advertisment in it. Probably would not have saved the business. Thanks for your honest story

[csixty4]

I actually did just that. Gave it a custom discount code for 20% off and got zero orders. The kind of people who get their fun from making fun of other people's pictures on a gaming forum aren't the kind of people with $25-40 to spend on a gift basket for a friend or family member.

In fact, I think that was the biggest flaw in the business. "Goths" in general had no problem spending $200 on a new black dress from the vendor next to us, but balked at a $45 gift arrangement with etched goblets and candle holders. Expensive gifts are their own niche, and really need to be more general-purpose. $10-15 really was the sweet spot for a gift, but the quality would have suffered.

Another issue was payment processing. Our margins were thinner than we were comfortable with, so we didn't want the added expense of a proper merchant account & something like authorize.net. There wasn't anything like Square yet, so we used Paypal Checkout. Our analytics showed something like a quarter of checkouts were abandoned at the point where we redirected to Paypal.

My goal was to grow this into the "CafePress of gifting" where people could build their own gift arrangements from a selection of general & niche items: balloons, teddy bears, whips & chains...a bunch of things to choose from. And then they could sell their creations in their own branded store for a percentage of the price. I should have accelerated that plan, but it might have required outside funding which I wasn't ready for.