Online sales for fashion remain strong, with almost half of U.S. consumers spending over $100 every month on clothing. As a result, it’s a great time to learn how to make a clothing website.
Where should you start? Dig into this comprehensive guide that explains how to sell clothes online.
Things You Need To Do Before You Learn How To Make a Clothing Website
Before building your website, take care of some important business matters.
Pick a Niche and a Target Audience
Have you ever heard the expression, “A product for everybody is a product for nobody”? In other words, you won’t get any sales if you don’t have items that focus on a specific demographic.
Pick a profitable niche, products, and target audience. Your brand should solve a distinct challenge for a certain group. Think beyond affordability and functionality. Try to provide a unique style that helps your customers express themselves. You should also be in a market that you’re passionate about and can add value to.
Even if you plan to expand, your brand still needs a clearly defined persona and target audience. For example, Nike creates performance-driven athletic wear, and you don’t expect to find it in the business or formalwear categories. Levi’s focuses on jeans and denim, and even its other types of clothes stay on brand with casual comfort. Clearly define your market before doing anything else.
Register Your Company
Each location has its own rules for running a business. You may need a license or permits, even if operating your business from your home.
Check the requirements for your area and determine whether you need a formal business structure, such as an LLC or a corporation. While you’ll need a company name to register your business, you can still pick a different name for your website and brand. Learn the local rules for registering a DBA (“Doing Business As”) name.
Choose Your Business Model
Your business model is how you develop your products and fulfill orders. Four popular options in e-commerce apparel are:
- Custom cut-and-sew: Your team creates items from scratch, or you outsource the process to someone else. While this is usually the most costly way to produce clothing, it allows you the greatest amount of originality, customization, and quality control.
- Print-on-demand: Instead of creating items from whole cloth, you produce specific designs for pre-existing items. For example, you could customize t-shirts, hats, or jerseys.
- White label or private label: You buy items from a manufacturer and sell them under your own brand. You have limited customization options but can buy in bulk for higher profit margins.
- Dropshipping: Partner with a supplier who handles manufacturing and shipping as you send in orders. Focus your energies on sales and marketing instead of inventory and production.
You may decide to use a combination of these methods. Weigh the pros and cons of each and pick whatever will be best for you to source and supply your clothing.
Create a Business Plan
Your company’s success hinges on the quality of your business plan. This document includes a detailed description that outlines your strategy, products, target audience, and business model. It’s usually instrumental in securing funding from investors or lenders.
Provide data on the market and your competitors to show your potential for growth and how you’ll carve out a space among other brands. Explain your plans for funding and how you’ll sustain cash flow. All of this analysis should create a roadmap for the first five years of your company.
How To Create a Clothing Website
The following tips will teach you everything you need to know about how to create a clothing website, even if you don’t have any technical expertise.
Choose Your E-Commerce Platform
Your website is your digital storefront, so picking the right platform is like choosing the perfect retail space. With dozens of choices, how do you pick the right one?
As you compare services, calculate your return on investment. This ROI involves much more than your initial costs and recurring subscription fees. Consider the time you’ll need to invest and the help you’ll need to hire to set up and maintain your store.
For instance, many of the cheapest options require you to have coding knowledge to build a secure and user-friendly site. You’ll also need someone to monitor site security and address cyber threats. While these platforms allow full customization, you’ll probably need to pay someone to do the work. Plus, each add-on and customization is an additional cost.
On the other hand, top no-code platforms walk you through how to build a fashion website without programming. For example, Shopify has a store builder that allows you to design a branded site with intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces. Let’s be honest, who wants to deal with coding headaches when Shopify makes it so easy?
After you launch, it’s easy to manage all aspects of your online shop with pre-built integrations. You can also add features to enhance the user experience. For example, adding a Shopify app like Kiwi Sizing, ensures customers get the right fit the first time, reducing returns and complaints.
Additionally, you should consider:
- The level of technical support: Can you readily access a support team for help around the clock?
- Capacity for growth: Will you be able to expand the site as your business grows?
- Free trial: Does the platform let you test how well you like it?
For good reason, one of the most popular e-commerce solutions for selling clothing is Shopify. With over 2 million active stores of all sizes, it is one of the best options for making a clothing website.
Pick a Brand Name and Domain Name
You need to pick a name for your brand and a URL for your website that distinguishes you from competitors and is easy for others to remember. Since millions of stores are already online, finding the right name can be challenging.
Fortunately, Shopify offers a business name generator to give you some ideas. Talk with other stakeholders as well as friends and family to vet your options. A good name is often short, catchy, easy to spell, and unique.
Select Your Themes and Templates
Your site theme and templates need to complement your brand values and voice. Shopify offers over 200 different themes that you can customize to fit your brand persona.
Though you may want to select one of the 13 free themes to save on costs, a classy premium theme helps you distinguish yourself. Pick a site layout that perfectly matches your color palette and style.
Add Pages
Insert pages for your store that cover every aspect of the online shopping experience. You don’t have to finalize the content just yet. Simply concentrate on building out the structure of your site. As you do so, ensure that your store is easy to navigate, especially for mobile devices.
Naturally, you need an attractive homepage with elements that encourage shoppers to dig deeper, such as seasonal sales and current promotions. Most sites have an About page to explain their mission and vision. A Contact Us page lets visitors know how to reach you with questions, comments, or concerns.
A page with your shipping, returns, and privacy policies is also helpful and is usually a legal requirement. You might be able to put that information into a general FAQ page, along with a size chart. Of course, don’t forget about your product pages!
Add Products, Descriptions, and Pricing
Product pages need captivating content to drive customer conversions. Start with excellent images that show clothing from different angles. It’s even better to show the garments on a model.
Pay close attention to your headings and descriptions. Not only does the text encourage sales, but it is also part of search engine optimization. Vivid language with well-chosen keywords helps your products appear higher in search engine results when people look for the types of items you’re selling. Make pricing and discounts easy to find and understand.
Set Up Payment Processing and Shipping Options
Customers will leave carts with unpurchased items if completing a transaction is too difficult. Enable a one-click checkout and accept auto-filled payment methods for seamless purchases. Shopify has these features automatically ready for you to enable.
Ensure that visitors can buy items easily by accepting whatever payment options are popular. In addition to credit and debit, consider allowing gift cards, ACH, PayPal, and cryptocurrency. Many stores see an increase in sales when accepting buy now, pay later services.
Put some thought into your shipping strategy, too. Free delivery is common, and you can factor that expense into your product pricing. Whether you pass on shipping costs or absorb them, remember to calculate packaging costs, product dimensions, parcel weights, and carrier rates for different locations.
Customize Your Store’s Design and Features
Beyond a theme, make sure your logo and font are consistent across your site. Customers should have no doubt that they’re on one of your pages.
Include store apps and integrations that streamline site management and enhance the user experience. For example, the Kiwi Sizing app is the best way for customers to enter their measurements and find the right fit. Apps for inventory management, social media marketing, and collecting reviews are a few examples of integrations that simplify routine tasks.
How To Build a Fashion Website Into a Thriving Brand
Having an operational site with great products isn’t enough to succeed, especially with hundreds of competitors and new ones appearing every day. The following tips help you make your brand even stronger:
- Advertise and market your store across various channels. Use email, social media, and the site itself, where you can use blog content to boost SEO.
- Measure your performance. Use metrics to understand how users engage with your site and determine what gets the most traction.
- Experiment with new features and test their effectiveness. Compare the site metrics you get from different designs and features to figure out how you can continually enhance your online store.
No successful clothing website is set-it-and-forget-it. Continually tinker with your store to meet your customers’ needs and keep growing.
Common Questions About How To Sell Clothes Online
Here are some answers to frequent concerns about starting an online apparel store.
How Much Does It Cost To Start a Clothing Website?
You may be able to start the most basic dropshipping or print-on-demand clothing site as a sole proprietor for $39. That’s the cost of Shopify’s Basic plan when paid monthly. However, the platform also runs promotions for new customers where the first few months only cost $1 each.
White-label and custom cut-and-sew sites are more expensive and can easily cost over $5,000 to launch. That’s because you’ll have to purchase inventory and cover fees for permits and business taxes.
Do I Need an LLC To Start a Clothing Brand?
No, it’s not a legal requirement to create an LLC to start a clothing brand. You can run your business as a sole proprietor under your own name.
However, entrepreneurs who plan on expanding and want more than a side hustle tend to use LLCs to protect their personal property from business debts, loans, and obligations, as well as other legal action. If you’re not sure whether you want to use an LLC, you can start as a sole proprietor and change to an LLC later.
What Are the Advantages of an Online vs. an In-Person Clothing Shop?
The e-commerce apparel market has continued to gain ground on brick-and-mortar stores among retailers and their customers. Online shopping is more convenient for customers, who can make purchases at any time from anywhere.
Also, it’s easier and less expensive for a brand to set up a digital shop than to lease and manage a physical storefront. You can set up a store in as little as a few days for a fraction of the cost of an offline store. Ongoing costs and overhead will be lower, and you can more easily make adjustments to your operations.
A digital store reaches a much larger audience within your niche instead of just finding those who are local. Even if you still want to run a brick-and-mortar location, a digital platform such as Shopify simplifies managing and marketing both channels with its point-of-sale integrations.
Use Kiwi Sizing To Make a Clothing Website That’s Easy To Use
Now you’re ready to launch and operate a thriving online clothing store! Remember that the key to your success is launching a digital store that’s easy for you and your customers to use.
How can you make a clothing website that ensures your customers find the right size every time? Use the Kiwi Sizing app. Discover how simple it is to set up by contacting our team.
