
// Development
How to Start an Online Clothing Business?
// Development
Nowadays, anyone with an idea, network connectivity and entrepreneurial spirit can start an online business. The easiest way to do this is by selling clothes, as they are most in demand, segmented by a huge number of niches and do not require special conditions for storage and delivery. From our article you will learn what you need to do to open an online clothing store.
For the success of an online store, it is important not only to choose the right market (selling clothes), but also to find in it an area, segment, place - a niche that is not yet occupied or underused by competitors. This will create a unique user experience and thereby bypass competitors in the selected niche (even a very small).
Niche selection will affect:
A niche can be wide, for example, for men, women, children’s or sportswear, or narrow, for example, T-shirts, jeans, swimwear, underwear, school suits or clothes for dolls. The narrower the niche, the better, because it will allow you to concentrate on a narrower target audience.
You can choose a niche based on your experience and preferences, but you can bet on analytical tools, such as Google Trends, and analysis of competitor sites: Amazon, AliExpress, Oberlo, Trend Hunter and others.
Google Trends is very simple to use, just enter keywords such as “buy a school suit”, time interval, search category and select a country. The system will show how, where and when this request is popular. So you can analyze and compare different requests and thus understand what customers want.
Analyzing Trend Hunter. The site was created specifically to search for current trends, in particular to help with the selection of products for online stores. There is no list of popular products and keywords on it; instead, the site describes popular trends, target groups and gives recommendations.
There are five major business models in the online clothing business:
To start such a business, you need up to $ 500 and about a month of time, most of which will be spent on creating your own website and promoting it. Buying a printer for printing on clothing is optional; you can rent it or use services such as Printify.
Depending on the complexity of your clothes, starting a store may require from 2 to 50 thousand investments. So, if it’s just a sale of branded clothing, then you need funds to purchase clothes, rent a warehouse, launch a website and pay for the work of the staff who will do this. You can buy blanks on the ThreadBird and Just Like Hero sites or their analogues in your country.
Social networks. You can still sell clothes on Instagram and Pinterest. Usually, social networks use to sell used clothes or things made by their own hands. Large brands prefer to use these sites to promote and redirect traffic to their sites.
Own website. The easiest way to create it is with the help of special e-commerce platforms that are customized for the launch of online stores. Usually these are template solutions with design customization options, content management system, e-commerce tools, etc. Here are some of these platforms:
Whichever platform you choose, you will need to customize it for yourself: choose a design, color scheme, create a logo, and more. All this can be done based on personal preferences (if you have good taste) or using special web services:
In addition, you can reward first buyers with unique terms of loyalty programs, discount cards and other things that are useful in the long run.