👻 The $249 Ghost Sale

Before I get into it, I just want to say that my recent unemployment has left me a vast amount of tinkering time, which I very much enjoy. I have so much unfinished business and projects, I'm not even sure that I want to actively look for work right now. 😅 It is absolutely amazing to have some free time to work on things! I consider myself lucky to be in a position at the moment where I can (sort of 😅) afford to take a brief break from the working world.

You know when you are working full time and doing all that life demands of you, it's nearly impossible to fully immerse your self in a bunch of little visions that sprout in your brain. You may try, but it's simply not the same as a full on investment. You start projects, have ideas, grand plans even. You start them, you get distracted, and they get placed on the back burner and fade into the sands of time. dramatic ethereal sounds

Not this woman and not at this moment! 👻 So let's get to it, the ghost sales.

1. The Hat

I asked claude to put on it's google analytics hat. Yes, I actually told it that. I sell blacklight reactive art, tapestries, and clothing. The designs come from my own paintings or graphic art. I recently built a Rails shop for it and run it on a tiny server at home. Sales were seriously lacking and I wanted to know what the best move was so I could get a few more sales.

I connected my analytics and ad accounts to claude and asked the question: "given the historical data, what should I do?

2. Confident Wrong Answers

• First Idea: Purchase tracking was broken because my Google Analytics tag lived on my old Shopify store. Wrong, the tag was on my real site, and was sending ecommerce events for weeks.
• Second Idea: My ads were sending people to the dead Shopify store. They were not, the ads pointed to the right place the whole time.

After these ideas were checked off the list, claude ran some checking of hostnames, page sources, and the actual code. This produced some monumental findings.

3. A customer placed a large order, and Google never saw it

Google analytics was showing ZERO purchases, ever. I knew with my own eyes, discord alert bot, stripe dashboard, and bank account that this transaction did indeed happen. Someone had placed an order for about $249.

😅 So for as long as this store has existed, Google Ads had been trying to find more buyers without ever being told what a buyer looked like. It was instead optimizing for add to carts, which, in October, also numbered zero.

Here is my October: 675 visits 29 product views, and 0 add-to-carts. Claude stated exactly:

"People walked in, looked at the homepage like it was a museum lobby, and left."

My art can't possibly be that terrible. 😂😂😂 Without letting it eat away at my ego, I knew that I had unfinished business with Google Analytics, and that this storm was bound to happen. So I braced for the impending doom.

4. The Ads: 2 Accounts, one was empty

Of my two Google Ads accounts, one had all the history. The other had nothing at all, just vibing out in the Google Analytics cosmos. 🕶️

5. Graveyard of dead links 🪦

I've been selling online for years. The Shopify and Etsy links were still out in the wild wreaking havoc on my ads performance.

This included:

• Facebook Posts
• Google results
• a dev.to article
• Instagram
• Snapchat

Analytics logged 155 different old paths getting visits, each resulting in a 404. dies, rolls over, and dies a second time

--> Side Tangent: You can connect claude to supermetrics and use a free trial. That was a saving grace for someone new to Google Analytics. Highly recommend, they have a free trial!

Claude built me a redirect map with 191 entries. Old products go to their new pages. A retired bikini goes to a search for bikinis. Old policy goes to new policy. Every link was checked against the live site.

click http://shop.everfluorescent.art/products/winged-cat-fleece-hoodie-mens-fleece-full-zip-hoodie-model-h60
301   https://www.everfluorescent.com/products/winged-cat-fleece-hoodie-mens-fleece-full-zip-hoodie-model-h60
301   https://www.everfluorescent.com/products/winged-cat-fleece-hoodie
200   a hoodie, at last

I had to make a detour to the domain registrar. The first forwards were 'temporary' and 'don't include the path,' so all the old links landed on the homepage. Back to the museum lobby. Then I discovered an expired SSL certificate which expired on October 9th. It's supposed to be renewing at the moment. 😂

6. Production running a feature branch, and other confessions

I'm just going to drop a screenshot, the artifact frames it beautifully.

...in my defense the aftermath of having too much unfinished business! 😅🤣

End of Day Summary 10/24/2026

No guilt or shame, just slight embarrassment.

I have only myself to answer to. I have definitely wasted money. All the more reason to hold myself accountable for fixing it. I guess I didn't realize how wild I made things, having Etsy shops and Shopify's from 2019. You have to clean up all your old stuff. The big lesson here I learned is just that. I spent so much time trying to create a brand presence online that I polluted the web with broken links and old paths.

That very behavior was sending potential customers to repeated 404 pages, and for that, I feel slightly unnerved albeit comedic for the reader. This is me being as transparent as possible in my journey.

If you recently visited one of my links and got a 404 I would encourage you to try again, and let me know how bad my work is tomorrow. 🤣 Thanks for reading my drama, everyone.

** I used snippets of an artifact I had Claude create for me after this experience to help me write this post. Some things were re-written from the artifact and somethings are my own unique thoughts.