A shop owner is uncertain whether their incomplete e-commerce site can be published and process sales while still under development.
Current situation:
Site has minimal products listed
Significant design customization work remains
Owner is still learning how to make necessary changes
Key concerns:
Whether the template functions for actual transactions “out of the box”
If the checkout process will work properly for real customers
Hesitant to test by publishing prematurely or risk failed customer orders
Underlying issue:
The owner has pending work they’re delaying to focus on launching the site, but the learning curve is taking longer than expected. They’re seeking confirmation on whether it’s safe to publish and accept orders in the current state, or if they should complete development first.
Summarized with AI on October 31.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
There are hardly any things for sale on it, so far.
I still have to quite drasically change the look of most of the elements on every page & try to ask the correct questions in order to gather all the information I need to make these changes.
My question is, can I publish my site & make sales?
Are these templates ready to make sales “out of the box”?
If I follow one of my items through, I get to a check-out page. Will that actually work for a potential customer? I could obviously make an order myself to find some of these things out, but it’s not published yet & I don’t want to publish the site & then find out I shouldn’t have, or for someone to make an order only to find that it doesn’t work for them.
The main reason I’m asking is that I have some work waiting to be done & I’m putting it off trying to get the site live but, because it’s all so new to me, it’s taking an extraordinary amount of time to get the help & answers I need & I can’t keep putting off the work.
It’s important to know if your site is not finish then you shouldn’t make it live.
First spend time to finish your site then make it live. If you could share your store url then I can take a look into it and provide you the best suggestions for your site.
I would never advocate for dropshipping like Gelato… but why not? It’s not like publishing it is going to bring in tons of people. No one even knows about it unless you start advertising.
That said, you should always test purchase to make sure it goes through.
No response to the above, which is actually supposed to be a question to the @Howie10 post above. Unfortunately, using the specific @Howie10 reply button didn’t seem to make that connection.
So, @Howie10, I’m not sure what you mean by “I would never advocate for dropshipping like Gelato”. Is there a problem with Gelato or do you just mean that testing a site with a third party involved who will charge me, could get expensive if the site doesn’t work properly?
Secondly, genuine question, everyone asks for a URL but the site is not live, which is the whole point of the thread. Is it possible for me to share the URL of a site that isn’t live?
Perfection is the enemy of good.
See every entrepreneur article on making an MVP
Don’t publish broken content, placeholder content or slop but also don’t wait to make mistakes to learn from.
Really there’s too many variables for anyone on the outside to give you a simple binary.
Even if the theme content looks okay there can be other issues that just plain take work & time to step through.
If you are an established photographer who is simply selling prints, that’s one thing. But the vast majority of dropshippers are only interested in doing the least amount of work possible. They will try their best to make claims, and pretty up their site, all in vain because the core of their business is flawed. Customers don’t want dropshipping anymore. This forum has a graveyard of dropshipping merchants asking why they don’t get sales. So the only way you’re going to make it work is if you put in the effort, like buying the products yourself and verifying the quality.
Gelato, like Printify, doesn’t own or operate the printing warehouses or the shipping facilities. So neither of you are involved. Gelato is a shoddy print on demand operation at best. Products go missing, get sent to the wrong address, horrible print quality, etc. Once shipped, the support stops. A missing package then is YOUR responsibility. And again, since they don’t make the product (they don’t even tell you who does) you cannot honestly guarantee anything to your customers. So for me as a customer, say I want to return an item for a refund because it’s defective. It not only looks bad on you, but then you have to deal with the consequences. You are financially responsible for my refund. I paid you. Do you have any idea how this is going to work? Have you done the work to figure out where I’m sending the return and how I’m getting my money back?
Like the below video explains, it’s just like Mr. Beast burger, that was done through ghost kitchens on Doordash (legal, but highly immoral). Gelato hides who is making the product. You, as a merchant of said product, have no idea what or who is involved. You don’t get to do any QC on anything and you rely on anonymous sources to provide products to your customers. Check it out, do some research. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB6JHgNPZjU
Okay @Howie10, I’ve managed to struggle through that video again.
The only negative I can see is that Gelato’s suppliers remain anonymous. But that’s her only negative. (Although I suppose that also means that, since she refuses to use Gelato because of the anonimity, she doesn’t have personal experience of the service.)
This doesn’t alter the fact that the quality of the Gelato t-shirt in the video came 2nd out of five & the two from Printify came 1st & 5th! The video doesn’t cover any delivery problems or complaints but price-wise & quality-wise they come out well.
The guarantees that Gelato offer certainly conflict with what you mention above, but you’re (presumably) speaking from personal experience & it would be stupid of me to ignore that.
I personally have found Gelato’s customer services to be quite hard to deal with, not because they’re bad, just because it’s very hard to get through to a human. That said, their chat bot, like the shopify one, is very good & is able to help me with most issues.
I’m definitely gonna do some more reasearch, get some samples ordered & look into Printful as an alternative, as they produce all their own stuff so thanks for taking the time to flag this.