Bike All Day

• www.bikeallday.com (dead now)

• Summer 2015

Bike All Day was meant to be a niche site for bike enthusiasts looking for cool cheap accessories. The value hypothesis was that cyclists would want a convenient and easily accessible site where they could browse and purchase add-ons for their bike.

Research was just done through a Google Survey posted on the cycling subreddit asking them about their experience purchasing bike accessories online. One prominent problem was price, so I sought to fix that. Surveys assume you know the right questions to ask, so not talking to customers in person was still a big mistake here.

I spent months learning WooCommerce to build this website. To keep prices low, I dropshipped (shipped directly from Chinese factories to purchaser), but I neglected to consider the quality concerns and didn't assess how much customers would be willing to sacrifice quality for price. This could have been preemptively addressed had I talked to customers or launched a site with just one featured product to test whether customers would buy that (assuming the product doesn't have variations that the user may want). I also advertised directly through Facebook ads, hoping for them to click the ad and make a purchase straightaway.

I had only $170 in sales throughout the lifetime of the website with ~$85 spent. People were not very likely to convert into a paying customer after merely clicking a Facebook ad.

I found that while my prices were low, consumers wouldn't immediately buy something from a site they saw in an Facebook ad. I should have built trust by getting people to like my page and then advertising to those. The half of my value hypothesis about wanting cheap products was right, but I failed to consider the trust that customers desired in shops. Simple user experience testing could have solved this.