Is investing in social media, SEO and advertising wasted when testing a concept for a web store?

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Hi guys,

Last month I asked r/entrepreneur how I could validate the concept for a web store selling Scandinavian homewares (throws, cushions, candle lights etc.).

I got a great suggestion to build a site selling similar products, only when somebody clicks "Buy now" on any given product, they get a popup explaining the shop is just a test shop, and that if they provide an email address they will get a discount coupon on their first order when the shop opens for real. Even though I was dubious anyone would actually go through with signing up, I thought I would give it a go, because I didn't want to spend £6k on stock before knowing whether or not anyone would be interested in buying it.

So, I set up a store on shopify - http://ift.tt/1UaZTNq - and listed a few dozen similar items to the ones I'd like to stock, also adding some basic SEO and a blog post describing the store and explaining what I was doing. Once I had everything up and running, I figured I would sit back and see what bites... around the same time I learned I was probably being naive, and it took me a week or so to realise it wasn't going to be so simple. I had next to no traffic (I think all the traffic was my own!), and started to understand that I would have to invest some serious time building social media channels, improving SEO and probably buying some advertising. And that's just to get people coming through the site, let alone parting with their hard earned email address.

So my question to you guys is - is it going to be worth investing time (and money too if I go down google ad route), to drive traffic to a site which will no longer exist if I decide to go for it and open the real store?

I know there is a demand for the products, as there is a lot of competition out there. This only makes hitting the front page of google an even lengthier process. So part of me now just thinks that the concept for the store is fine, it's just learning how to drive enough traffic and convert that to sales which will be difficult.

Has anyone done something similar before? What would you guys do in the same situation?

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