How to Start an Online Clothing Store: 2021 Step-by-Step Guide

Full Name: Afaq Umara Riwansyah

Time to accomplish: 2 hours (with editing)

Nowadays, the internet is hugely make an impact on many aspects of the

business wold. Thanks to the internet, many small and mid-scale businesses has
gained their momentum to shine. With relatively small efforts, they can compete to
attract potential customers to purchase their product or use their service. The
clothing business is no exception. With a well-constructed platform to sell clothing
products online, sellers can boost their sales and promote their brand to the masses.

So let’s say you are on your way to start your online clothing business. As the
beginning, knowing a basic guide is a must to make sure you are on track to optimize
the miracle of the internet to boost your profit. This article will help you start your
very own online clothing store by providing all the basic steps from choosing the
right platform to host your eCommerce business to some tips on how to add your
products to your store nicely.

1. Choose a Platform to Host Your eCommerce Business

The first thing to consider to start an online store for your clothing business is
choosing an eCommerce platform. This step is really important since a right platform
would determine your ability to accustom your online store. When it comes to the
two main types of eCommerce platforms, there are two main options for that;
Website builders and content management system (CMS).

Website Builder
Website builder is suitable for someone who just started their online store or
someone who is in need of a website quickly since it is easy to use and you don’t
need to have a coding skill to get started. There are plenty of options of website
builder that suit your need, namely Shopify, Wix, Zyro, and many more with the price
ranging from $1.39/month up to more than $30/month.

One of the popular website builder on the internet is Zyro. It comes with a free-
trial for you to try out quickly. You just have to sign up, pick one of the available
templates, add your products to your store, publish it by just one click, and your
online store is all set. It even comes with AI-based marketing features for your
branding and marketing needs such as AI slogan generator, AI logo maker, AI
business name generator and many more.
Pros
 Covers all site builder essential. Website builder comes with a hosting plan
that is managed by the website builder team. You don’t need to separately
purchase a hosting plan. It also comes with SSL certificate and have CDN
enabled for performance boost and security reasons.
 Easy to get started. With the available templates, you just have to pick one
that suits your niche and do an easy layout editing with its drag-and-drop
feature.
 Intuitive eCommerce functions. It is packed with useful and practical
functions to manage your online store neatly such as order tracking and
shipping management, secure payment method, automated tax calculations,
and such.

Cons
 Restrictions on customization. It is heavily relied on available templates and
features. Users can’t add custom elements like animated effects to their
website.
 Hard to migrate. As a website builder company offers a hosting plan, it is
possible to migrate to other company in case you need to maximize your
website functionality in the future.
 Content Management System
The second option to start your online clothing business is using CMS to build
your website. However, unlike the website builder, the hosting service is not
provided. Some of the most well-known CMS are WordPress, Magento, and
PrestaShop.
Wordpress is arguably one of the most popular CMS out there. It covers a wide
range of websites from simple yet intuitive websites to a complex and
comprehensive ones. It is not uncommon that Wordpress hosted many world’s big
companies such as The New York Times. The pricing itself ranges from less than
$10/month to more than $1.000/month.
Pros
 Flexibility on Customization. With a number of extentions available, users
have freedom to install features that are not built-in. This creates limitless
possibility of customization which can make a website stands out among the
others.
 Complete control. One of the perks of using CMS is that the user has full
control of their website and data, for example when they want to change
their content regularly.
 Future proof. When your business is growing in the future and you need to
adjust or upgrade your website to meet the increasing traffic or catalog.

Cons
 Costly. Choosing CMS as your platform might be costly for a beginner since
the pricing does not come in handy. Users need to calculate the costs of
maintenance, domain name, and every element installed in their websites
by themselves.
 Learn basic coding skills. Having said that the customization of CMS is
practically limitless, the user still needs to learn the basic of HTML, CSS, or
Java script to get the most of those custom elements and tools of their
website.
2. Choose a Theme and Customize Your Store’s Design
The visual of your website plays a big part on engaging potential customers to
purchase your product. Thus, choosing the right theme and doing neat arrangement
of your website is also an important step on starting your business. Here, you need
to pay attention to some general principles of good web design for an online store.

 Site-Web Design and Layout

Make sure the overall design of your website is easy to navigate. Arrange the
menus according to your products categorization. It’s important as well to
keep it simple by focusing on your brand and products.
 Coloring
Color palette is also a crucial factor on how you want to build a mood with
 the customers. Try to learn some basic color psychology to invite your
customer to stay on your website and make a purchase. For example, blue
represents trust and security. If your website is mainly made of this color
palette, most likely the customers would perceive your brand and products
as credible and trustworthy.
 Branding
You must not forget to not only focus on gaining as many profits as possible
through your website. Use the website to maximize the promotion of your
brand so it can grow bigger in the long run. Show the customers who you are
as a company and be unique.

3. Add the Products to Your Online Store

When all the visual elements are all set, the next step is to add your products to
your website. You can manually add your products one by one if you only have a few
amount of them or bulk import your products if you have many of them. There are
some points to consider when you are doing this step;

 Upload only high-quality product images

In clothing industry where customers usually have tendency to experience
the product in hands, whether by touching the fabric or just put and try it on
themselves, selling them in an online environment where they can only see
a product through an image can be problematic. This is the major reason
why you need to provide your website with only high-quality images.
Maximize the experience of your customers with your products through
clear and sharp images to get them convinced.
 Pricing
What’s a business without smart pricing strategies? Pricing strategies are
one of the most prominent factors whether a customer would purchase a
product or not. Moreover, looking through the competitiveness between
sellers nowadays, these factors should be taken into consideration seriously.
Putting the price too high would make the customers look somewhere else
to shop and putting it too low would risk your business in the long run. Now,
let’s dive in to the three main pricing strategies;

Cost-based pricing strategy

The most basic one is cost-based pricing strategy. To put it simply, the price
of a product is determined by combining the production costs (tax and
shipping included) and the profit you want to make from the purchase. It is
very simple and easy to be applied by beginners. However, as the sellers are
less likely to take their competitors into account, they’re prone to set the
price too high.

Value-based pricing strategy

This strategy is the opposite of the cost-based strategies. It considers the
value (happiness, efficiency,etc.) that the product would make to the
customers to set a product price. For a beginner, it might be a bit tricky to
calculate the value of a product and it can make them to ignore product
costs. However, this strategy is suitable for the long term to improve
customers loyalty as well as to gain new customers.

Competitor-based pricing strategy

As the name implies, this pricing strategy is based on the competitors’ price
of the same or similar products. The sellers should keep an eye on existing
and emerging competitors and need a smart data management to make the
most effective pricing decision. However, by setting the right price, the
brands would gain competitiveness in a highly competitive market although
they still need to keep an eye to not to enter a “race to the bottom” and fall
into bankruptcy.

Set up product variants

It is more likely for a product from clothing business to have more than a
variant, whether its sizes, colors, materials and such in order to widen its
selling market. In your clothing website, you can add the variants of a
product by putting different images for every color or material options of a
product, you can also automatically adjust the price differently based on the
size of a product.

Taxes and Shipping

The amount of tax and shipping price should also be taken into
considerations when you start your online clothing store. Most sellers
usually add the tax into production cost to make simplify the pricing. For the
 shipping, there are many options you can choose to be implemented in your
online store. You can offer free-shipping to local customers or to those who
purchase your products in bulk. You can also implement a flat-rate shipping
pricing that charged a single fee to all kinds of purchase.

 Product description
A good product description is needed in the online business to attract
customers to click the purchase button. On the contrary, a product with a
bad description could risk a potential customer to close your website and
look elsewhere. To make a good product description there are some points
to consider;

Knowing your target audience

As a seller you need to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. You need to
smartly know what they need in a description based on who your target
customers are. You need to smartly write the tone and language of the
description to match your audience, so make sure your target audience can
relate to your product description.

Focus on product benefits

Description of a product should contain its benefits to convince the
customers to make a purchase. They should know in an instant that the
product is beneficial and worth buying. Make sure to not ignore the writing
arrangement of these benefits since it can be long and the customers would
lose interest to read it. The usage of bullet points would be a big help here.

Carefully choose the words

In the digital era where the business competition is really high, the
optimization of word choice is crucial to keep your brand on the top of
search engine result page. Thus, you need to keep a track on keywords that
are on trend. Optimize it by using SEO tools such as Google Search Control,
Yoast SEO, and many others.
Are you excited to launch your online clothing store!?
Starting a new clothing store in this digital era can be tricky and a bit confusing for
some. Afraid not, we’ve shown you a step-by-step guide on how to start your own
online clothing store in this article.

Let’s recap what we’ve learned to start an online clothing store:

1. Choose a platform to host your eCommerce business. Try to adjust your
needs to decide which one is perfect for you.
2. Choose a theme that suits your brand and products and customize your
store’s design to attract potential customers.
3. Lastly, add product to your online store’s without ignoring the quality of the
product images, pricing strategies, and engaging product description.

We hope this article has helped and encouraged you to take your first step to start
digitalize your clothing business. Feel free to share your story and feedback in the
comment section down below. Remember, a small step today would be a big leap
tomorrow.