Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
What You Need to Know<br />
about Selling Online<br />
Domain Name<br />
As a clothing brand, you’ll be selling tees online and offline. For online, you<br />
need your own site with your own domain name. I feel like this is as obvious as<br />
putting a coat on when you go outside in the winter.<br />
Getting your own domain costs roughly $10/year. You could reserve that through<br />
GoDaddy.com and be done with it. You could use your brand name like cureapparelco.com<br />
or get something creative like findthecure.com or curerocks.com.<br />
Other areas to register your domain: Network Solutions, Blue Host, or Yahoo.<br />
Big Cartel makes it really easy to set<br />
up your own online t-shirt shop.<br />
Hosting<br />
THREAD’S NOT DEAD • Jeff Finley<br />
Hosting ranges from free to wildly expensive.<br />
You could always start out on social media<br />
sites like Facebook, Myspace, or whatever is<br />
hot at the time. It doesn’t cost a thing to reach<br />
people and show off your goods. Alternatively<br />
you could host a free blog at wordpress.com,<br />
blogger.com, or tumblr.com. A<strong>not</strong>her baby<br />
step up and you’ll pay a small fee at virb.com<br />
or squarespace.com to build a more custom<br />
site. These are all hosted solutions.<br />
If you’re serious (which you should be) think<br />
about hosting your own site for more control.<br />
You could use Rackspace or Softlayer like we<br />
do at Go Media. I know a lot of people that use<br />
Media Temple or Host Gator as well. These<br />
hosting plans can range from $4.95/month<br />
to a few thousand per month for a managed<br />
and dedicated server. I suggest you do your<br />
research, read hosting reviews, and judge for<br />
yourself.<br />
E-Commerce<br />
For free and cheap e-commerce, everyone seems to use Big Cartel when they’re<br />
just starting out. Big Cartel is an amazingly simple storefront to sell your goods.<br />
It doesn’t get much easier than that. They charge a flat monthly fee and don’t<br />
take a cut of your sales. You could also use a site like Storenvy or IndieMerch-<br />
Store to start selling your stuff without a whole lot of technical knowledge. For<br />
these, you simply need a PayPal account and you can start getting paid!<br />
However, if you want more control over your sales, stats, customers, and promotions,<br />
you might want to consider upgrading to a more robust eCommerce<br />
solution like Magento, Zen Cart, CS Cart, osCommerce, Shopify, Volusion, etc.<br />
There are literally hundreds of choices, but those are some of the major ones.<br />
These solutions usually require a merchant account and some technical expertise<br />
to get it off the ground. I recommend this once you already have a growing<br />
customer base. A merchant account is a type of bank account that allows businesses<br />
to accept payments by debit or credit cards.<br />
It’s a lot cheaper and easier than you think to have<br />
your own site with your own web presence.<br />
Accepting Credit Cards Online<br />
You can accept credit cards easily with PayPal, but most professional brands<br />
have the ability to accept cards directly on their site. PayPal Website Payments<br />
Pro is one option. A<strong>not</strong>her option is to apply for a merchant account like Merchant<br />
Warehouse (we have used them in the past) and a credit card processor<br />
like Authorize.net.<br />
The biggest benefit to using these systems is that you can get more sales by<br />
accepting credit cards on your site. It creates a seamless experience for your<br />
customer. The cons are that they charge a lot of fees and you, the seller, are<br />
responsible for dealing with fraud and chargebacks. Like hosting and domain<br />
registration, there are many providers. I say read reviews and judge for yourself.<br />
Sales & Fulfillment 68
Change language