How to Open an Online Clothing Store
Many people wonder how to open an online clothing store, thinking it is a difficult or costly endeavor. The truth is that running a traditional clothing store is 10-20 times more expensive than opening the same type of store online.
When you start an online clothing store, you avoid costs such as:
* Renting retail space
* Buying inventory for the store
* Purchasing a cash register
* Buying other equipment for the store
These are tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of złotys that you would have to invest at once before thinking about any sales…
Clothing is the most popular product category imaginable, so don’t waste your time wondering how to open an online clothing store. Just do it, because the cost of opening a clothing store in the internet is pocket change compared to a traditional store. And the truth is that many traditional clothing stores end up failing, would you be able to calmly shrug off losing 50-60 or 100 thousand zł invested in such a store?
You can launch an online clothing store for just a few thousand zł, and here’s another good news: you don’t have to invest in inventory. You don’t have to buy larger quantities of products, which would save you tens of thousands of zł because online stores allow dropshipping.
What is dropshipping?
Dropshipping is the sale of warehouse stocks from clothing wholesalers, where you don’t invest in product or store space but the wholesaler does, and your only task is to sell their stock.
There are global wholesalers operating worldwide, it’s basically huge e-commerce platforms that offer a ridiculously wide range of products. You can browse them for weeks without running out of new things to see, no wholesale company in the world would be able to offer such a variety at such low prices.
Global clothing wholesalers have another advantage: they offer full integration with online stores, which means that you only import product images and descriptions from these platforms, not the products themselves. You set your own prices, accept payments, order individual products only when your customer has paid you (of course, plus a small markup).
The wholesaler then ships the product to the end customer for you, so you don’t have to call a courier or go to the post office yourself, all these inconvenient tasks are handled by the wholesaler.
Online stores can sell any type of product, and their other advantage is flexibility. If you don’t want to sell a particular item, just remove it from your store without losing any money, which wouldn’t be the case with traditional stores where you would have to find someone who bought your warehouse stock.
In online stores, changing the store’s profile is as simple as deleting products in the admin panel and importing new ones from these wholesale platforms. These platforms offer not only clothing but almost every type of product that comes to mind, because they are currently one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world, concentrating thousands of producers and wholesalers from all over the world.
This gives you access to a global market, so you don’t have to waste time writing product descriptions or thinking about how to do it. You get everything for free: professional product images, written by someone else, product descriptions, customer reviews… You just set your prices and accept payments, then order individual products only when your customer has paid you.
Here’s what you need to do:
* Have a website built (I’ve been doing this for 15 years now, so feel free to use my services)
* Import the clothing items you’re interested in from wholesale platforms
* Accept payments from customers who buy something from your store
* Order products from wholesalers and have them shipped to end customers
You don’t invest in inventory until you have a customer, you don’t buy large quantities of products, which is the biggest cost advantage. You can set your prices high or low, depending on what the wholesaler charges you.
The platform’s other benefit is that local wholesalers cannot compete with its prices, so your margins don’t have to be 20-30% (and even that depends on the level of purchases from the wholesaler…), but rather several hundred percent without any requirements regarding turnover with the wholesaler – that’s the difference.
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