(or how to test an e-commerce product idea)

This is how I planned to create a flowers-and-sweets bundle gift service.

It's a localised business that spans a few km around the area where I and my partner live.

It's completely online, no store-front. People select a product and we deliver it to them.
That is because it's a test (an MVP) to see if there's demand for this product. If so, we could invest to a physical store in the area.

The Hafs would be the name of the shop where we would sell flowers (purchase them), sweets & coffee (make them). The reason I titled this The Hafs as a Service is because, for the test, we don't make any of the products. We just bundle them and distribute them.

This is the moodboard we made:

The frontend (what happens) of the service is the sequence of the following steps:

1. Promote
2. Convert (website)
3. Compile (buy the items)
4. Deliver

This is the backend (how it happens) behind every step:

Promote

To find new prospects, use ads. Facebook & Instagram is where our clients mostly likely are. Since this is a test to find if there's demand in the area for our product, the ads should be shown only to people around that area.

When someone visits our site and buys the product, we collect their money and their email.
Then we go and buy the "ingredients" of our bundle and create the product.

Maybe even before someone buys, we could find ways to entice them to give us their email. This way, we build an email list and we can promote directly to them. Plus, we retarget them with our ads so it makes the ad system better and deliver better results.

New Prospects > Ads | Instagram & Facebook
Previous Buyers > email them

These are the settings for the Meta ad platform:

For ad creatives no need to re-invent the wheel. Find what's working and replicate it with your own photos. I found [Creative OS]( [https://www.creativeos.io/](https://www.creativeos.io/), which is a collection of ad templates. Pick 4-5 templates, transfer them to Canva. Then take photos of your products and replace them in the templates.

I found Creative OS on twitter in a thread, from [Sam Thompson](https://twitter.com/ImSamThompson). It's about a simple way to set Meta ads. Pretty straight-forward. This is the [twitter thread](https://twitter.com/ImSamThompson/status/1772398912164209109).

I'll copy/paste the section about ads:

Ad settings:
- No targeting
- Set-up your pixel in the Events Manager (Shopify makes it pretty easy).
- Set the budget at the ad set level. Start with 2-3x product price
- Set the ads to launch at 12:01am tonight & publish. THEN DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING. Let them sit for 48-72 hours.
- If you get a purchase or two in the first couple days you have an interesting product on your hands... Once you see what's working you will optimize two main things:
- Landing Page/Product Detail Page = increase
- CVR Ad Creatives = reduce 

Then I read something that got me thinking. This is from the article Which paid and organic channels should you pursue? from Julian Shapiro:

Two types of companies have the best chances of making paid ads work:

- High margin products — If you charge customers $2,000 for a mattress or $10,000/year for enterprise software, you have more wiggle room to experiment with ads until they work.
- Products with a high word-of-mouth or referral rate — If new users refer many more paying users, then you may be able to tolerate an upfront loss on acquiring customers via ads.

It made me think again about the viability of this test. That is because now we have to think about the sell price of the product. Let's say we go for 50e.

We have 4 expenses. 1) flowers, 2) sweets, 3) packaging, 4) ads.
Since we are only bundling the items, and not producing anything, the margins are going to be thin.

So, a cost estimation of one bundle:
1) flowers: 15e
2) sweets: 10-15e
3) packaging: 1e
Total: 26-30 euro

That means that to acquire a customer through ads, it should cost us less than 30e. After that, for every order, we are losing money.

So now the hypothesis is that we could sell a bundle for 50e and still be profitable. Or at least not lose money. Of course we haven't calculated the costs around the whole business (shopify subscription, other online tools, us getting paid for our work, etc).

But still, we are doing this to see if there's demand. If there is, we should find ways to reduce the cost to create one bundle, and make the margins bigger (yam).

Convert

OK, now we need to create the website. This is where we collect orders, money, and emails.

Fortunately, this is easy thanks to Shopify. Signup for a Basic plan (24e/month) and then choose a template. I chose two free templates on the Food category.

Crave and Ritual. I also found another option, a more generic template but  it includes a lot of extra plugins that can be very useful for upsells. It's Solodrop and it's only $20/month.

It will take some time to setup everything but in general, very straightforward stuff.

Compile

This is the step where we choose 1) the flowers, 2) sweets, 3) and the packaging.

For flowers, do some online research or go to local stores and try and find cheap but beautiful flowers. I prefer dried flowers because they need no maintenance and have long shelf life.

For sweets, I think I prefer cookies because they're also low maintenance, but I'm open to surprises while researching.

For packaging, I quickly found some ideas on Temu. Like this and this.

Deliver

Well, not much to say here. Put everything together and drive to the order location. Ring the bell, smile, say something nice, and leave.

Some growth questions

How could we engineer virality / word of mouth?
How can we make the product instagrammable? 
How do we encourage people to make stories and tag us?
How do we encourage people to tell their friends about our product?

Some retention questions

How could we make people buy again?
Once they bought, which channels could we use to communicate with them?
Could new promotions or new product drops bring back previous customers?

Other thoughts

• A subscription option for recurring deliveries.
• Add a super expensive offer. For example, if most bundles are around 50e, add a 200e option.
• Promote around specific holidays like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, etc

That's about it.

The biggest question is 'how do I know if there's demand?' Well, if orders come easily and profitable (not expensive), there's repeated orders, and we find ourselves making a lot of bundles so we don't have the time to deliver, well...

That's when you know.