How to Open an Online Clothing Store
The world is moving more and more toward e-commerce as people increase the amount of shopping they do online. Shopping from home is more convenient for busy people. To cash in on this movement toward e-commerce, you can claim your piece of online real estate by creating a website and opening an online clothing store.
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Instructions
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Determine what kinds of clothing you'll sell at your online clothing store. You could sell all kinds of clothing, but niche sites tend to do better than general sites. Decide whether to concentrate on women, plus sizes, teen girls, teen boys, children, infants or some other subgroup of the population.
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Use the Internet to find clothing suppliers that meet your needs. Shop around to find the best deals. Look for a supplier within the United States because there's not much control over scammers and thieves overseas, and too many United States store owners get bilked out of money by trying to buy from overseas suppliers.
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Think of a name for your online store. Make it something catchy, but spell it properly. For instance, if you'll sell children's clothing, you might think calling it KoolShirtzFerKidz.com is cute and catchy. However, customers might not find you by searching for "cool kids shirts." Also, word-of-mouth advertising would be difficult, requiring you to tell people the name of your site, then explaining how to spell it. Instead, spell each word correctly and avoid trendy spellings.
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Register your domain name. Your domain name is the name of your website, which people will type in to get to your store website.
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Purchase an e-commerce plan. GoDaddy.com offers a variety of ecommerce plans that will fit your needs, no matter how big or small your online clothing store is (see Resources section. An e-commerce plan will allow your customer to purchase things directly from your site and pay you with her credit card. Each time you make a sale, you will receive an email notification about the purchase so that you can ship the items out to the buyer.
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Purchase a hosting plan to host your website. You pay a web hosting company to store your site on its servers. One of the best, most reasonably-priced web hosting companies is Host Gator, where you can host an unlimited number of websites for less than $8 per month (see Resources section).
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Take photos of all of your inventory and place the images on your website, along with the pricing of each. Indicate sizes available and write a short description of each piece, including fabric content (just in case someone has an allergy or sensitivity to certain fabrics).
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Advertise your online clothing store site. You can do this online with Google Adwords (www.adwords.google.com), or other online pay-per-click advertising sites. Alternately, you could place ads in your local papers or on local television and radio stations.
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