T-shirts are an essential part of any person’s wardrobe. Thus, it is not a wonder that one can make a profitable business out of it just by selling a piece of clothing with stunning design or with a witty text on it. We are here for you to help to do this as quickly as possible. Without further ado, here are the steps that you will need to take.
P.S.- If you want a step-by-step process on how to start an online boutique, you can use this video by BoutiqueSetup. But this post will give you an overview of how things work.
Decide How you are Going to Import T-shirts into your Website
First of all, you will need to find a place which would print and ship your t-shirts to customers and provide easy importing into your website, in other words, you need to find a supplier. In case you don’t have one yet, you should check various print-on-demand services with WordPress or Shopify plugins. Also, you can use Product Upsell Shopify for boosting sales. If you are planning to design your website on WordPress and use WooCommerce you can check Printifiy.com Print on Demand Drop Shipping Platform – Shopify Print On Demand App, they print your t-shirt on-demand and ship them right away to your customer without you needing even to touch them.
Choose a Platform on Which to Design the Website
After you found a supplier you need a platform on which to design your website. I would personally recommend WordPress as they have amazing visual drag-and-drop plugins to help you with the design process. Also, WordPress provides a bunch of other plugins that will help you in running your e-commerce website. One of which is SendOwl Review: Sell Digital Products Online (May 2019) that was praised by Profit Industry as it does not have any transaction fees and contains a built-in affiliate system.
Homepage Layout
After you have done all other necessary preparation work, you will need to finally start designing your webpage and the best place to start is homepage layout as this is the first page your customers will land on. In this section, you need to decide what you are going to put into the header menu. The most common solution is to put buttons for all of the t-shirt categories, contact and shopping cart for easy access.
Now, you need to decide what you are going to put in the ‘Above the fold’ section, the place which customers see the first. Thus, it is must contain the most important information, be short and concise. This part must catch the visitor’s attention that it would be willing to scroll below and surf the website for more. Afterward, you need to design ‘below the fold’ section, this part contains more in-depth information about your store and t-shirts. It should act as a support for the ‘Above the fold’ section and should invite customers to buy your t-shirt Finally, you need to design a footer in which people commonly contain links to terms & services, privacy policy, contact, about us page and links to social media.
Choose a Theme or a Template
You can design a whole website on your one from scratch if you have coding and graphical design experience. However, it would be much faster to use some kind of website builder. Some time ago we wrote here about visual composer plugin for WordPress which can save weeks of designing work as you can choose to easily customize already built themes or templates with immediate visual feedback. This plugin also contains a unique feature to it which is called Visual Composer Hub. It allows to build a website from scratch implementing various different templates for different parts of your website and it allows multiple 3rd party app integrations one of which is WooCommerce which is important to such a website.
Choose Correct Colors, Fonts, Images and Content
There are several rules that you need to follow here. First of all, you need to choose the appropriate colors that would make your website look consistent and wouldn’t make it a customer deterrent. Secondly, one of the golden rules of website design is you mustn’t sacrifice readability for style. Never choose any font that makes text unreadable and makes it look consistent the same way as with colors. Images and website content is another important thing that you need to consider while designing a website.
Test Responsiveness
These days everyone uses mobile phones to search for stuff online. Therefore, it is important to design your website to be responsive to mobile as well as to other devices and across the browsers. Before launching your store, I would recommend checking how your website would look like on different mobile phones, tablets, and browsers. That way you will be able to fix design issues beforehand and even save yourself from high bounce rate.
It is Time to Publish
If you have done all the steps above you are ready to publish your website and start your online t-shirt store to take a piece of that $3.1 billion t-shirt industry.