spyguyzz
Elite Member
- Feb 23, 2012
- 4,753
- 572
Intro
Today i'm going to explain how to create a unique apparel store successfully
(this about apparel but it can be watches/electronics/books/accessories...etc whatever)
The thread is very simple to understand and you can get started today in making money.
You might think that T-shirt business is oldest business , that everyone and their dog tried it and failed and it’s over-saturated market.
Well, you are somewhat right. A lot of people are in this game..but over-saturated? No way.
Let’s get right into it.
Niches
you’re probably thinking, how do I find a good niche to start with? Well,there are several options which you can use. Below I will include a few options.
mix.com interesting site that finds weird and interesting articles & websites.
trends.google.com/trends my personal favorite, simply google a niche that you think is good and google will show you how is it currently standing.
If you’re really struggling below I will include some broad niches that are always ‘in’, you probably saw ads for a lot of them on facebook or instagram.
Newly released and/or popular TV shows & movies - Game of Thrones, Avengers, etc
Popular books - 50 shades of gray, 48 laws of power , Harry Potter , etc.
Pets - Cats, dogs, parrots, lizards, etc.
The more specialized the niche the better .For example, at-shirt “i love my dog” is not going to sell much as “i am a single girl, only guy in my life is my husky”
Try to come up with 4-5 niches, write them down, research market for each one (look thru facebook groups, subreddits, etc) and pick the one that has the most passionate fan base.
Once we have our niche, we can go ahead and search thru internet to see if there if anyone has done that niche before us and if there are any winning products.
Simplest method is probably to search google, facebook, twitter , ets, ebay, amazon, etc. and check how many people are interacting (liking, tagging friends, etc) on that post/ad.
if you are looking for paid tools to find niche check out spyfy & nichereaper
Design
it’s important not to overthink the design! We want our designs to stand out from what already exists in the niche we have chosen
Quotes - If you’re promoting a TV show, movie or book this is a great twist - Search “your niche + quotes” and pick one of the popular ones
Facebook fan pages, groups, forums, subreddits - Join various pages, forums and subreddits to see what people are discussing, any of them could make a great design as it’s clearly what your audience wants.
If your niche is newly released movie, see what other fans are discussing and come up with a design around it.
Once you identify an idea for your design, it’s time to design it and put it on t-shirt or other apparel
There are 2 ways to do it:
-Design it yourself
-Outsource, pay someone to make a design
Setup:
1- Domain Name
let’s start by getting the name for our new business. Don’t think too much about it. Just go with something simple & catchy.
head over to - leandomainsearch.com and search for “merch” or “apparel”, you ’ll often get awesome available domains that you can use for your new business. In my humble opinion, trendyapparel sounds much better than jimmyhoodies
Make sure not to setup the store around golf niche if you ’re planning on making a general store. Last thing you want to do it make a golf store and then sell dog t-shirts. Lol.
2- Logo
you may hire someone to design that for you or save few bucks and design it yourself using canva.com logo section and pick a template you like and you think works the best.
it won't take more than 5 minutes to finish it
3- Social Media
At this point, you should sign up on most major social media sites with your brand name (that you chose before). These accounts will be useful later for marketing, engaging with your customers and building & expanding a brand.
3- Website Platform
Now you have to choose which ecommerce platform you’re going to build your store on. Some of the honorable mentions are Shopify, Woocomerce, Wordpress, Spreadshirt, eBay, Amazon merch, etc
personally i prefer woo-commerce & shopify.
4- Pickup a Supplier
When it comes to choosing a supplier for our newly established business, we have 2 options. We can either use printing (print on demand) service such as Printful or Spreadshirt, or we can use 3rd party dropshipping supplier(aliexpress).
I personally always go with Printful (print on demand option). Printful does everything for you, from labeling, branding to shipping. If you choose dropshipping model, expect to do a bit more work (and obviously get higher profit %).
Dropshipping
You might we wondering, what is dropshipping? Instead of purchasing a large inventory of products (for example,100 t-shirt's)you will be ‘partnering’ with a supplier from china and list their products for sale.
Once you receive the order , you forward it to the supplier (probably on Aliexpress), he then ships the products to the customers house.He only charges you his price for the t-shirt, you can make your price however much you want.
Selling
eBay
Let’s start with eBay, later on I will show you other ways.
Pricing - First see what is your competition doing and how are they pricing their apparel. Try to under cut them by at least $0.50. Ideally you should undercut them by $3-$4 but that is often times impossible.
1-Shipping - Offering free shipping is a good idea if you can afford it. I personally include shipping cost in the price of the t-shirt. Now, if shipping is $10 you can’t really add $10 to already $19 .99 t-shirt.
2-Listing description - Just put basic information there,sizing,shipping time,etc.Make sure your contact information (phone number/email) is clearly visible so customers can’t contact you.
Often times they email me rather than using eBay message option.
3-Auction Types - I personally use Buy Now listings, auction one are simply too much work for me but they can work . I would just play around and see which one do you personally like better .
4-Keywords - Include simple keywords that describe your product, for example; I’m a husky lover and he is the only man in my life t-shirt Try to include as much information in the title as you can.
Shopify & Wordpress / Woocommerce
creating a store on these platforms not that easy you can use a free or paid themes and customize them or hire someone to create the store for you
Marketing
I will cover most of the free & paid ways to market your merch in order to get the customers.
I will always suggest to use paid traffic options, even tho sometimes free ones work better than paid ones.
1-Facebook - Find facebook groups related to your niche. Actually contribute to the discussion using your brand’s facebook page. If your posts are interesting & helpful, people will click on your account name and organically look at your products.. And purchase.
DO NOT SPAM GROUPS WITH YOUR STORE LINK! YOU WILL GET BANNED.
2-Reddit - Make an account with your website as the account name. Bring value to the community (subreddit) with your posts. People will organically checkout your website based on the username.
3-Instagram - Post interesting photos and content relating to your niche.This takes alot of time unless you’re using engagement bot, later on you can sell shoutouts to the page and have 2 sources of income .
4-Pinterest - This is similar to instagram, post up interesting content related to your niche. This will organically gain interest from those people who share passion with your niche. Include a lowkey link to your store/product in the description.
5-Local Ads - If your apparel(t-shirts) are geo-specific- about a town/city/place, you can print out flyers and spread them out across your neighborhood or city. Here where I live you can print hundreds of them for a few dollars. Make sure to include some kind of coupon, eg. “Take 15% o t-shirt when you include a coupon XYZ, oer valid only for people who have this flyer”, or something like that.
6-Facebook Ads - This is probably the most popular way of marketing your store/product.
7-Instagram Shoutouts - This one is pretty straightforward, you will be contacting instagram pages that are in your niche and see if they are interested in doing a paid promotion. 24 hour shoutout with story post and optionally link to your product in bio should cost you no more than $40-$50 (unless you want to get it from Kylie Jenner or something like that)
socialblade.com/instagram/ great site you can use to check how legit instagram influencer is
This way of advertising can also be done for free (in a way), below I will briefly explain how.
You can contact instagram/twitter/whatever social media you’re using influencers and offer them % of the profits in exchange of them to post your shoutout on their site. This is not as easy as you think but it can work. Don’t expect every influencer to reply, especially with this free method. You may have to contact 20-30 influencers before you get a reply from one that wants to do it.
8-SEO
The first priority, finding relevant keywords, requires knowing your audience and your business. Usually a quick gut check works fine.
The second priority, finding low competition keywords, requires knowing your site’s competitive power. All websites do not have an equal chance of ranking on the first page of Google. After all, there are only 10(ish) spots.
9-Etsy
This system allows you to create and upload unlimited number of shirt designs (and other apparel designs) fast and easy. And the marketplace we will be using is barely tapped into.
You will see option to advertise on etsy. You can try Google later on but thats for more advanced users.
1. Set your daily budget. Minimum is $1/day, I recommend to start with $3-$5/day. Don’t worry, you won't spend nowhere near that much.
2. Click on “Advanced Settings”
3. Click on “Set Maximum Cost Per Click” (Max CPC) so that it’s activated. Enter is as “0.02”.
You will probably get a notification/warning saying you wont get any clicks with such low CPC. Ignore it, you will.
That’s it. If you are seeing low impressions/clicks, you can put Max CPC to “0.03”. Max CPC = Maximum amount you will be paying for one click for your listing. 0.02 is $0.02 or 2 cents. 0.03 is $0.03 or 3 cents.
If you are not getting clicks or your listing/ad is performing poorly, it’s probably because of your product. It’s probably saturated.
What to do when you’re not getting clicks/sales on your store?
This also applies for most other ecommerce stores & shops (Shopify, Woocommerce, etc).
New Items: This is probably the most obvious one. If you do nothing else, adding new items is the most easiest way to get more views, clicks and sales on your shop.
More products = Chance that more people will see it = Views to your store = Clicks = Sales
Ideally, you should have at least 30 items in your shop . At least. Those obviously don’t have to always be new products, a simple new t-shirt color will do the job just fine. New size? Awesome. Long sleeve addition? Perfect.
Upsell Products: Optimize your shopping experience for your customers and create listings that are pre-bundled. For example, you might have parrot lovers niche apparel shop. Instead of offering just 1 t-shirt, bundle it with a hoodie and perhaps a mug or phone case and put a few $ discount on that. Perfect. Your AOV (Average Order Value) will automatically increase and you will sell more products.. obviously. Don’t forget about discount, customers love that!
Discounts: Always offer discounts to your customers. If a t-shirt costs $20, make it $23 and offer 15% discount. This will help you boost sales tremendously .
Keep Testing: Don’t get too attached to a product/niche. If your cat apparel is not getting click/sales, move on! You’re just wasting your money and time. I personally test 5 new products every day , but if you’re just starting out you can do 1 new product day or every 2nd day. You might lose money at first but when you find winning product/design, it will be all worth it.
I'm Done, Good Luck
Today i'm going to explain how to create a unique apparel store successfully
(this about apparel but it can be watches/electronics/books/accessories...etc whatever)
The thread is very simple to understand and you can get started today in making money.
You might think that T-shirt business is oldest business , that everyone and their dog tried it and failed and it’s over-saturated market.
Well, you are somewhat right. A lot of people are in this game..but over-saturated? No way.
Let’s get right into it.
Niches
you’re probably thinking, how do I find a good niche to start with? Well,there are several options which you can use. Below I will include a few options.
mix.com interesting site that finds weird and interesting articles & websites.
trends.google.com/trends my personal favorite, simply google a niche that you think is good and google will show you how is it currently standing.
If you’re really struggling below I will include some broad niches that are always ‘in’, you probably saw ads for a lot of them on facebook or instagram.
Newly released and/or popular TV shows & movies - Game of Thrones, Avengers, etc
Popular books - 50 shades of gray, 48 laws of power , Harry Potter , etc.
Pets - Cats, dogs, parrots, lizards, etc.
The more specialized the niche the better .For example, at-shirt “i love my dog” is not going to sell much as “i am a single girl, only guy in my life is my husky”
Try to come up with 4-5 niches, write them down, research market for each one (look thru facebook groups, subreddits, etc) and pick the one that has the most passionate fan base.
Once we have our niche, we can go ahead and search thru internet to see if there if anyone has done that niche before us and if there are any winning products.
Simplest method is probably to search google, facebook, twitter , ets, ebay, amazon, etc. and check how many people are interacting (liking, tagging friends, etc) on that post/ad.
if you are looking for paid tools to find niche check out spyfy & nichereaper
Design
it’s important not to overthink the design! We want our designs to stand out from what already exists in the niche we have chosen
Quotes - If you’re promoting a TV show, movie or book this is a great twist - Search “your niche + quotes” and pick one of the popular ones
Facebook fan pages, groups, forums, subreddits - Join various pages, forums and subreddits to see what people are discussing, any of them could make a great design as it’s clearly what your audience wants.
If your niche is newly released movie, see what other fans are discussing and come up with a design around it.
Once you identify an idea for your design, it’s time to design it and put it on t-shirt or other apparel
There are 2 ways to do it:
-Design it yourself
-Outsource, pay someone to make a design
Setup:
1- Domain Name
let’s start by getting the name for our new business. Don’t think too much about it. Just go with something simple & catchy.
head over to - leandomainsearch.com and search for “merch” or “apparel”, you ’ll often get awesome available domains that you can use for your new business. In my humble opinion, trendyapparel sounds much better than jimmyhoodies
Make sure not to setup the store around golf niche if you ’re planning on making a general store. Last thing you want to do it make a golf store and then sell dog t-shirts. Lol.
2- Logo
you may hire someone to design that for you or save few bucks and design it yourself using canva.com logo section and pick a template you like and you think works the best.
it won't take more than 5 minutes to finish it
3- Social Media
At this point, you should sign up on most major social media sites with your brand name (that you chose before). These accounts will be useful later for marketing, engaging with your customers and building & expanding a brand.
3- Website Platform
Now you have to choose which ecommerce platform you’re going to build your store on. Some of the honorable mentions are Shopify, Woocomerce, Wordpress, Spreadshirt, eBay, Amazon merch, etc
personally i prefer woo-commerce & shopify.
4- Pickup a Supplier
When it comes to choosing a supplier for our newly established business, we have 2 options. We can either use printing (print on demand) service such as Printful or Spreadshirt, or we can use 3rd party dropshipping supplier(aliexpress).
I personally always go with Printful (print on demand option). Printful does everything for you, from labeling, branding to shipping. If you choose dropshipping model, expect to do a bit more work (and obviously get higher profit %).
Dropshipping
You might we wondering, what is dropshipping? Instead of purchasing a large inventory of products (for example,100 t-shirt's)you will be ‘partnering’ with a supplier from china and list their products for sale.
Once you receive the order , you forward it to the supplier (probably on Aliexpress), he then ships the products to the customers house.He only charges you his price for the t-shirt, you can make your price however much you want.
Selling
eBay
Let’s start with eBay, later on I will show you other ways.
Pricing - First see what is your competition doing and how are they pricing their apparel. Try to under cut them by at least $0.50. Ideally you should undercut them by $3-$4 but that is often times impossible.
1-Shipping - Offering free shipping is a good idea if you can afford it. I personally include shipping cost in the price of the t-shirt. Now, if shipping is $10 you can’t really add $10 to already $19 .99 t-shirt.
2-Listing description - Just put basic information there,sizing,shipping time,etc.Make sure your contact information (phone number/email) is clearly visible so customers can’t contact you.
Often times they email me rather than using eBay message option.
3-Auction Types - I personally use Buy Now listings, auction one are simply too much work for me but they can work . I would just play around and see which one do you personally like better .
4-Keywords - Include simple keywords that describe your product, for example; I’m a husky lover and he is the only man in my life t-shirt Try to include as much information in the title as you can.
Shopify & Wordpress / Woocommerce
creating a store on these platforms not that easy you can use a free or paid themes and customize them or hire someone to create the store for you
Marketing
I will cover most of the free & paid ways to market your merch in order to get the customers.
I will always suggest to use paid traffic options, even tho sometimes free ones work better than paid ones.
1-Facebook - Find facebook groups related to your niche. Actually contribute to the discussion using your brand’s facebook page. If your posts are interesting & helpful, people will click on your account name and organically look at your products.. And purchase.
DO NOT SPAM GROUPS WITH YOUR STORE LINK! YOU WILL GET BANNED.
2-Reddit - Make an account with your website as the account name. Bring value to the community (subreddit) with your posts. People will organically checkout your website based on the username.
3-Instagram - Post interesting photos and content relating to your niche.This takes alot of time unless you’re using engagement bot, later on you can sell shoutouts to the page and have 2 sources of income .
4-Pinterest - This is similar to instagram, post up interesting content related to your niche. This will organically gain interest from those people who share passion with your niche. Include a lowkey link to your store/product in the description.
5-Local Ads - If your apparel(t-shirts) are geo-specific- about a town/city/place, you can print out flyers and spread them out across your neighborhood or city. Here where I live you can print hundreds of them for a few dollars. Make sure to include some kind of coupon, eg. “Take 15% o t-shirt when you include a coupon XYZ, oer valid only for people who have this flyer”, or something like that.
6-Facebook Ads - This is probably the most popular way of marketing your store/product.
7-Instagram Shoutouts - This one is pretty straightforward, you will be contacting instagram pages that are in your niche and see if they are interested in doing a paid promotion. 24 hour shoutout with story post and optionally link to your product in bio should cost you no more than $40-$50 (unless you want to get it from Kylie Jenner or something like that)
socialblade.com/instagram/ great site you can use to check how legit instagram influencer is
This way of advertising can also be done for free (in a way), below I will briefly explain how.
You can contact instagram/twitter/whatever social media you’re using influencers and offer them % of the profits in exchange of them to post your shoutout on their site. This is not as easy as you think but it can work. Don’t expect every influencer to reply, especially with this free method. You may have to contact 20-30 influencers before you get a reply from one that wants to do it.
8-SEO
The first priority, finding relevant keywords, requires knowing your audience and your business. Usually a quick gut check works fine.
The second priority, finding low competition keywords, requires knowing your site’s competitive power. All websites do not have an equal chance of ranking on the first page of Google. After all, there are only 10(ish) spots.
9-Etsy
This system allows you to create and upload unlimited number of shirt designs (and other apparel designs) fast and easy. And the marketplace we will be using is barely tapped into.
You will see option to advertise on etsy. You can try Google later on but thats for more advanced users.
1. Set your daily budget. Minimum is $1/day, I recommend to start with $3-$5/day. Don’t worry, you won't spend nowhere near that much.
2. Click on “Advanced Settings”
3. Click on “Set Maximum Cost Per Click” (Max CPC) so that it’s activated. Enter is as “0.02”.
You will probably get a notification/warning saying you wont get any clicks with such low CPC. Ignore it, you will.
That’s it. If you are seeing low impressions/clicks, you can put Max CPC to “0.03”. Max CPC = Maximum amount you will be paying for one click for your listing. 0.02 is $0.02 or 2 cents. 0.03 is $0.03 or 3 cents.
If you are not getting clicks or your listing/ad is performing poorly, it’s probably because of your product. It’s probably saturated.
What to do when you’re not getting clicks/sales on your store?
This also applies for most other ecommerce stores & shops (Shopify, Woocommerce, etc).
New Items: This is probably the most obvious one. If you do nothing else, adding new items is the most easiest way to get more views, clicks and sales on your shop.
More products = Chance that more people will see it = Views to your store = Clicks = Sales
Ideally, you should have at least 30 items in your shop . At least. Those obviously don’t have to always be new products, a simple new t-shirt color will do the job just fine. New size? Awesome. Long sleeve addition? Perfect.
Upsell Products: Optimize your shopping experience for your customers and create listings that are pre-bundled. For example, you might have parrot lovers niche apparel shop. Instead of offering just 1 t-shirt, bundle it with a hoodie and perhaps a mug or phone case and put a few $ discount on that. Perfect. Your AOV (Average Order Value) will automatically increase and you will sell more products.. obviously. Don’t forget about discount, customers love that!
Discounts: Always offer discounts to your customers. If a t-shirt costs $20, make it $23 and offer 15% discount. This will help you boost sales tremendously .
Keep Testing: Don’t get too attached to a product/niche. If your cat apparel is not getting click/sales, move on! You’re just wasting your money and time. I personally test 5 new products every day , but if you’re just starting out you can do 1 new product day or every 2nd day. You might lose money at first but when you find winning product/design, it will be all worth it.
I'm Done, Good Luck
