And why every small business owner needs to check their six
I've always been fairly transparent about the challenges of running a small business. I don't believe any good comes from sugar-coating the trials and tribulations of keeping things going, and this particular trial has been a long one.
One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the nine years I've been operating as Grow & Bloom Co. is this: technology will inevitably break and fail you. And if you're not prepared to deal with it quickly, it will cost you a small fortune. Not only in lost revenue that slowly leaks out like a rubber dinghy with a pinhole, but in lost time. Time you could have spent sleeping, or watering plants, or bingeing your favourite TV show.
Fail to plan, plan to fail
There's that old saying: fail to plan, plan to fail.
I'd like to tell you the last decade was properly mapped out, but that would be a lie. Like most heart-led creatives, I jumped headfirst into business without fully understanding the ecosystem our digital footprints live on. I've been learning as I go, and honestly, I think most of us are.
One helpful card I kept in my back pocket, though, was that I spent a lot of my teenage years hanging out with DJs and tech nerds who taught me how to build computers, use basic Unix commands and code HTML. I don't claim to be anywhere close to keeping up with what technology is doing these days, but I at least understand how to troubleshoot and problem-solve. That foundation has saved me more times than I can count.
Paying for it doesn't mean it works
Here's the thing: just because you pay X dollars a month for a website on the world's most popular e-commerce platform doesn't mean it's going to work properly 365 days a year.
Call me old-fashioned, but I think it should.
After all, we're creative business people. What do we know about Liquid files and JSON and syntax errors? Nothing, and that's exactly why people work in the tech sector fixing things for a living. Most of us have no clue, technology is moving faster than any of us can keep up with, and every time a major platform pushes a behind-the-scenes update, it can break something small. Sometimes something not so small.
What broke
My issues, the ones I really began to notice, started last October.
I'll keep this short because the technical details are boring, and the real point of this story is whether I've been able to fix it. Here's the gist. Shopify had begun moving away from its older REST API toward GraphQL, the newer system for how apps and integrations talk to your store. For the developers and tech companies building on Shopify, this was a planned transition. For small merchants like me, it was invisible.
As best I can tell, the changes quietly disrupted a cascade of connections running beneath my website. Products were mass-archived, and nearly 80% of my catalogue was suddenly invisible. Shopify Payments was disconnected at a level I couldn't even see from my admin dashboard. Products were removed from all sales channels. And from there, the domino effect:
I lost access to my Meta Business tools entirely, because the integration just stopped recognizing my store. My Google Merchant Centre channel stopped syncing, leaving ghost product listings floating around in search results. Items were showing as out of stock when they weren't. Variant URLs were broken, meaning customers could browse but couldn't actually buy anything. And all of this was happening silently, behind the scenes, while I was busy arranging flowers and assuming everything was fine.
Months of digging
I spent months trying to figure this out.
I was determined to find and fix the issues myself so I'd understand what had happened in case it ever happened again. Sure, I could have hired someone to diagnose and repair all of it in the fall and saved myself hours of strained eyes and frustration. But what fun is that? And more importantly, what would I have learned?
So I dug in. And here's where the lemons-to-lemonade part of this story kicks in: I would not have been able to find, diagnose or fix any of this without learning how to use AI agents. Not the chatbot-that-writes-your-captions kind of AI. I'm talking about tools that can actually crawl your site, read your code, audit your pages and walk you through what's broken and why, in plain language, at 11pm, without billing you by the hour.
Learning to work with AI agents let me punch way above my weight class. I ran crawls. I read documentation written for developers, not florists, and when I didn't understand it, I had an AI break it down for me. I learned what a data-product-url attribute does and why it matters. I wrote 304 URL redirects. I bulk-deleted 263 ghost products from Google's index. I rebuilt page structures, fixed hidden heading tags and rewrote schema markup from scratch. None of that is in my job description. But with the right tools and a willingness to learn, it didn't have to be.
It was still tedious and unglamorous, and there were definitely moments when I wondered whether I should burn the whole thing down and start over on a different platform. But piece by piece, the site came back to life.
Check your six
The point of all this isn't to pat myself on the back. It's to sound the alarm.
Broken technology is the silent killer of click-through rates. You will leak revenue until you notice and fix it, hire someone to check it out, or shut down and give up because you think the problem is you, when really it was a lack of visibility that did you in.
In a world that's putting all its eggs in the technology basket, it's smart to know how to make a mean omelette in case they break. Check your analytics. Click your own buy buttons. Google your own products. Subscribe to your own newsletters. You'll never know something's broken if you aren't paying attention.
And if you're a fellow small business owner reading this and nodding along, you're not alone. The technology will fail you eventually. What matters is how quickly you catch it.
Robin, Grow & Bloom Co.
London, Ontario