Back in May, I posted a short apology saying the cart page had been broken for an undetermined amount of time.
I want to sit with that phrase for a second, because it is the most honest thing I have written on this blog. Not "the cart broke on Tuesday." Undetermined. I did not know how long people had been unable to buy things from me. I found out because someone finally said something.
That was not a one-off. That was the pattern, and it is why the website you are looking at now is a different website.
What running WooCommerce actually cost
When I moved to WordPress and WooCommerce, I ran the numbers and they looked good. WooCommerce itself is free. Pay for hosting, add the pieces you need, only pay for what you use. Next to a monthly platform fee, it seemed obvious.
Here is what it looked like by the end:
- WordPress hosting: $300 or more per year
- Firewall and security services: another $300 or so per year
- Plus every integration, individually
That security line is the one I want to flag for anyone else running this math. It is not optional and it is easy to leave off the spreadsheet. WordPress and WooCommerce have gaps you are expected to cover yourself, which meant standing up and maintaining a firewall service in front of my own store. I spent my professional life in IT. I know how to do this. That is exactly why I knew I could not keep doing it on top of a day job and an embroidery business.
The money was the smaller cost. The real one was that I could not trust it. I was testing my own checkout most days, by hand, hunting for things that had quietly stopped working, and still missing them. That is not running a business. That is standing guard.
What I got wrong
About a year ago I wrote a post on this blog explaining why WooCommerce was the right call for TundraGeek Creations. Cheaper, more flexible, integrates with everything I use. I meant it.
I was wrong, and I would rather say so plainly than quietly redirect the old page and hope nobody notices.
Two things I misjudged. The first is that "cheaper and more flexible" is only true if the labor is free. It is not free. For a web development shop, where the site is the product, WooCommerce may well still be the better answer. For one person with a day job, a machine to run, products to design, and markets to prep, every hour spent maintaining a website is an hour not spent making the things people actually buy.
The second was a timing bet that did not land. When I chose WooCommerce, TikTok Shop integration was advertised as freely available for it and the Shopify version had not been announced yet. That gap closed. I built around an advantage that stopped existing.
I should also admit my opinion of Shopify was out of date. I tried it years ago, decided it was expensive for what I got, and carried that conclusion forward without ever re-checking it. Part of why it looked expensive is that I had convinced myself I still needed to pay separately for website hosting. I did not. Shopify includes it, and the security along with it.
My current plan runs $39 a month. That is $468 a year against the roughly $600 I was spending on hosting and security alone, before a single integration. Cheaper, but not dramatically, and I would rather be straight about that than sell you a number. On software cost it came out close to a wash. I moved anyway, because the software was never the expensive part.
That is the whole reversal, and it is not complicated. I priced the software and forgot to price my own time.
The move itself
The part I dreaded went fine. Getting products, pages, and posts across was smoother than I expected once I understood the tools.
The part I had not thought about at all was DNS, and it was miserable. My domain was on Cloudflare. Shopify also runs on Cloudflare, so I could not simply point the records where they needed to go. I tried moving the zone to an Azure instance I run, and the changes would not propagate in time for the migration to see them. In the end I pulled the whole zone back to GoDaddy, my registrar, and rebuilt several back-end services from there.
None of that is visible to you, which is sort of the point. The migration guide covers the store. Then you spend a weekend on the plumbing.
What is different for you
This is the part that actually matters, so I will be specific.
The store works, and I can tell when it does not. No more undetermined amounts of time. That is the whole reason for the move.
Ordering custom work is faster. Custom stickers and custom pup hood accessories both have real order pages now. You pick what you want, you pay at checkout, and the proof happens as part of production instead of a separate round of emails.
On stickers, that means you choose removable, permanent, or holographic, pick a size and pack, upload your art, and check out. After that I prep your file and email you a digital proof, with two revision rounds included, before anything gets printed. Nothing goes to production without your sign-off, and production runs about seven to ten business days.
The pup hood side works the same way, and that flow just finished, so it is fresh off the bench.
The old way meant filling out a form, waiting for me to price it, waiting for an invoice, and only then starting. That delay is gone.
Ordering direct costs less than ordering through a marketplace. Marketplaces take their cut and my prices there have to account for it, so the product itself comes out lower here. Shipping is another story and it is moving fast right now, so I will not promise you a number on it. I am not going anywhere on Etsy and I am glad people find me there. But if you already know what you want, here is the cheaper door.
New things show up faster. Less time fighting the website is more time listing products, which is the entire point.
Where the blog went
Fair question, given the gap.
Three things stacked up. The migration turned every tag from the old blog into a separate blog on the new one, so one readable feed became a scattered mess I had to consolidate by hand. Then I noticed the blog was not even linked in the site menu, which it now is. And I had no way to share a post out to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and LinkedIn without doing it manually four times. WordPress used to handle that for me. Shopify does not.
Stack those on a migration and a market season and there was nothing left in the tank. I have been collecting post ideas the entire time and getting to none of them. Working on that next.
The other thing quietly eating that time: product photos. Some buyers were confused about quantities, and when I went to check, I found photos old enough that they genuinely misrepresented what would arrive in the box. That is not acceptable and I am working through it. If you have ever received something from me that did not match the picture, that is on me, and it is being fixed.
Since May
June got busy in a way I did not plan for. A few designs took off on TikTok all at once and I spent several weeks doing little else but keeping up: the paw-shaped pride flag keychains, the pup-themed bone-shaped keychains, and the position keychains.
Anchorage Pride Fest was a blast and easily our best event this year. Mat-Su Valley Pride followed close behind and also went well. I was too busy at both to take a single usable photo, which is the good version of that problem.
Behind the scenes I have been rebuilding the booth itself: new signage, a different physical layout, and changes to make the whole thing easier to pack and haul. All of it came from standing behind that table this year and noticing what made people hesitate.
What is next
Fall and winter market events are coming and I am chasing them now. Product photography continues. More convention tags and badges are queued, some new patch designs are moving from my head into actual thread, and the hat lineup keeps growing.
And more posts here, now that posting here is something I can reasonably do again.
Thanks for sticking around.
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