Have you been thinking about setting up your own vintage business? Here’s what you need to know:

Decide which type of clothing to specialise in

So, you have made the decision that you wish to run a vintage clothing business, but to build up a dedicated customer base, you will need to specialise in a specific era or trend for the customer to have faith in your products. For example, it wouldn’t be wise to mix ladies 1930’s fashions with 1980’s punk because your audience will be confused as to where your expertise lies and whether your stock is genuine vintage. A trusted vintage store is one that concentrates on a particular period and can provide a substantial amount of knowledge on the item of clothing they are selling.

Build up your inventory

Being a good vintage business owner is being in the know of the best places to source clothes. Many turn to the likes of eBay, thrift stores or garage sales to find unwanted belongings that are going for low prices. Before you make any purchases, research whether the item you have found will make a substantial profit and ask for the specific details to avoid being ripped off. Don’t overlook clothing in poor condition (e.g., with tears and holes), as these items could make you the most significant amount of profit, rroviding yourself or a professional company can make the necessary repairs to restore them back to their former glory.

Choose where to sell

Many businesses are now choosing to run solely online as it is much easier to keep the outgoing costs to a minimum, with no large overheads to think about. While some businesses choose to use platforms such as eBay and Etsy, it would be advised to look into selling your clothing on an ecommerce platform such as Shopify. This site allows you to create your own domain name, build your online store with customisable themes and keep track of orders with the single dashboard feature. Not only can you do without having to invest in a good website, but all of your business dealings are kept in one place and can be accessed from your smartphone. It means that wherever in the world you may be, you’re always kept in the loop on how efficient your business is running.

Use clear photographs

It would be wise to hire a professional photographer to take photos of your stock if you haven’t yet invested in a high-quality camera or studio set-up. Although this can be costly, there is a greater chance of your clothing selling, rather than simply hanging them on the back of the door looking lifeless. Not only will this come across as unprofessional, but potential customers are likely to be off-put if they can’t see what the garment looks like when worn. With this in mind, you may also need to purchase a mannequin or hire a model to showcase your clothing properly. Outdoor shots are great for magazine-style photographs; whereas studio shots are ideal for focusing the attention on solely the garment.

Owning a business is not as rare as it used to be. In fact, many people are quitting their day jobs to find themselves founding businesses based on their lifelong loves and passions. For people who have created their own product, this could not be truer, which is why they may choose to open an online store. Making any business grow is a difficult task, but ensuring your store stands out from the crowd is essential. Ideally, you should take note of some important advice if you want your start-up to grow into something brilliant.

Keep an open mind

Many business owners feel as though it is their way or no way. Although it is true that you may be an expert in your field, it is also true that you should be open to suggestions from other people. This could mean taking advice from a larger company that you were once inspired by, to listening to consumer feedback when you want to promise a better product. Although it can be hard, inviting creativity and innovative thinking into your company means your products will stand out from the masses, even if you are competing in a saturated market.

Attract investment

When an eCommerce business grows, it is never just due to sales. The more investment you have from people, the more able you are to funnel funding into creating new products, and bettering existing ones. Investors can come in the form of anyone interested in the stock market, to finding an angel investor. In any case, you should make sure that you are using this investment wisely. If you do, you can watch your business slowly grow, and investment begin to build – a process which becomes a wonderful cycle when you get it right.

Increase sales

It may sound obvious, but without sales, your eCommerce business will slowly plummet to the ground. Whether you are selling to businesses or consumers, you should focus on reaching new sales profits year after year. Having a great product is the first step, but there are luckily many more ways you can maximise sales. From selling your goods online to promoting them in social media campaigns, your marketing and sales teams can explore the various options you need to increase sales extensively. You should also make sure to use the correct platform to process these sales on; as Magento is falling in popularity, you can find a reliable Magento enterprise alternative to sustain your sales when you are both starting out and growing bigger.

Think globally

In the traditional world of eCommerce, many companies were limited to attracting sales from their local area. Thanks to social media, you can reach into the global markets to sell your products. Without the need for travelling far, you can even interact with international employees over video calls to ensure global sales are going well. You can also market your products to people on the other side of the world after you have considered shipping costs. Opening your business to the world will have a huge impact on your growth, but you should only make sure to delve into it if your business can handle it.

One of the great things about using Shopify as a shopping cart is the huge range of plugins to choose from. Depending which way you look at it, this can be a blessing or a curse, so this guide should give you a quick list of must have apps and how they can help you boost your online sales.

The shopify app store has hundreds of apps, with more being added regularly. Whether you‘re looking to increase sales, manage your inventory better, connect to third party software or just have a cooler looking store – as the saying goes ‘there’s an app for that’.

Here’s 10 shopify apps I’m currently in my online store using and how they’ve helped my business.

Yotpo Social Reviews – http://apps.shopify.com/yotpo-social-reviews

Reviews are one of the most important thing shoppers look for when deciding whether to make a purchase. They help to build trust, show that your product is quality (hopefully it is), and most of all build elements of social proof around your business and products .

Yotpo take all the hassle out of generating customer reviews, by emailing your customers after they’ve made a purchase, and asks nicely for a review. You can customise everything from the email design, the text, to how many days after purchase you want to ask for a review. You can also include a coupon to further entice a review. It then sends out the reviews to your social channels which helps create more social proof around your products.

Yotpo also includes an analytics dashboard so you can see if it’s bringing in any traffic, and generating any revenue from that traffic.

It also adds the review star ratings under your products, showing customers your star ratings just as the customers are deciding whether to purchase or not – Awesome! The app is free for most features, but for $10/month you can enable the rich snippets feature – which shows your 5 star ratings in the google search results – totally worth it if you rely on google for search traffic.

Hello Bar – http://apps.shopify.com/the-hello-bar

You’ve probably seen hello bar around the web. It’s a simple plugin that enables you  to add a customisable bar at the top of you website. You can advertise your current specials, your shipping rates, just a friendly message or anything really. Hello bar is free for up to 20 click throughs per month.

Olark – http://apps.shopify.com/olark-live-chat-cartsaver

Live chat for websites is popping up more and more lately – with good reason. Anything you can do to let your customers know that they are dealing with real people and not just a webpage helps to build trust and will create more sales. Olark is a live chat support plugin that enables your customers to chat directly with you or your team while they are browsing your store.

Being able to respond straight away to customer queries is also a great way to separate yourself from competitors, show that you care, address any concerns the customer has before purchasing and gives extra confidence that you will deliver on what you say.

The plugin is customisable to suit your store’s design and also lets customers leave a message if you are not online. My favourite feature of Olark however is the detailed visitor information it gives you. So you can be notified when someone has added to their cart, how they found your site and where they are located.

Olark is free for up to 20 chats/month and then starts at $15 for the basic plan.

Contact Form http://apps.shopify.com/contact-form

If you don’t plan to offer live chat support, then Contact Form is a good alternative. It’s a basic app that creates a pop-up tab on your site, and allows visitors to leave you a message that gets sent straight to your inbox. It costs $14 once off, however there are alternatives but I haven’t found any that look as nice.

Chimpified – http://apps.shopify.com/chimpified

If you are selling online then you should be doing some form of email marketing. Whether it’s sending abandoned cart emails, special offers or just regular newsletters. Chimpified integrates with Mailchimp and automatically adds your customers to your email marketing lists inside mailchimp. The app is free and so is mailchimp for the smaller plans.

Retail Tower – http://apps.shopify.com/retailtower

If you’ve ever had to format a data feed manually then Retail Tower will save you a lot of time.

Retail Tower generates data feeds for all your products for the popular shopping comparison websites – Myshopping.com.au, shopbot.com.au, getprice.com.au as well as google shopping so you can get your products more visibility around the web. The app itself is free, however various shopping comparison websites charge a small fee for any traffic they send you.

Happy Ending – http://apps.shopify.com/happy-ending

Who doesn’t enjoy a happy ending? And it shouldn’t be any different for your valued customers as they are leaving your site. Happy ending creates customisable templates after your checkout page, that can direct them to your facebook or google plus profiles or even share their purchase on twitter. It’s a good time to get them to involved in your community while their purchase is still fresh in their mind. Happy Ending costs $6/month.

Wholesaler http://apps.shopify.com/wholesaler

If you plan to sell wholesale as well as direct to customers, then Wholesaler is a great plugin for this. It creates a wholesale registration page and lets you offer different levels of pricing to your wholesale customers, without showing your regular customers.

Refersion –http://apps.shopify.com/refersion

Refersion is an awesome app makes it super easy for any Shopify store to run their own affiliate program. It creates your own landing page for your store, with the affiliate program details and allows publishers to signup in order to promote your products. Every part of the affiliate program is customisable and you can set the commission  given, choose between a % or a Dollar amount and even the length of the cookies.

Refersion handles all the payments, which are done through paypal. You just decide when to pay your affiliates and release the payments. The price is right – with a free plan to get you started.

Refferal Candy – http://apps.shopify.com/referralcandy

I’ve just started using refferal candy, so haven’t gotten results from it yet. But I can see it’s potential, particularly if you’re products are popular on social media and something people would share. Refferal Candy essentially allows any customer to be an affiliate for your shop. They don’t need a website or email list. Once they make a purchase they are given the option to share their purchase on social media, and give a discount to their friends. For any one of their friends that makes a purchase, they get a bonus. Either a coupon for your store, or cold hard cash in their paypal account.

You can set the exact payout amounts however you like. So you need to know exactly how much a new customer is worth to you. Also keep in mind enticing customers by offering discounts upfront may not mean they are as valuable as a regular customer over the longterm.

Know any more great shopify apps? Leave a comment below!

There was a time when I would have scoffed at the recommendation to use a template to create your website.

As web DESIGNERs we believed that each business was unique and deserved an individual online expression of its snowflake-like beauty.

Nowadays I wouldn’t build a site without one, so what has changed ? Do we no longer consider ourselves web DESIGNERs?

The fact is the focus has changed and people who use websites have changed the way they enjoy the web. It’s now the information orientated observer who is visiting your website, with less time to smell the roses in a much, much more crowded online world.

But it’s a template it will look like everyone else’s website!

Don’t worry you are still unique and beautiful; now there are thousands of templates to choose from, for every software platform, all incredibly customisable leaving plenty of room left for self expression.

But the key argument is due to the (up to) 40% of visitors viewing your website on a mobile or tablet, this being the case design needs to be RESPONSIVE.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN

The key argument for the use of the website template is responsiveness(ness). The modern website has 5 faces; desktop, mobile portrait, mobile landscape, tablet portrait, tablet landscape.

It will essentially shuffle the content around to make sure the font size is readable, the images fit on the screen and the most important stuff is emphasised on the small screen where attention spans are reduced.

It also means you don’t have to pay for 5 individual designs., which leads us to:

PRICE

A separate design for Mobile, Tablet and Desktop screens is not unheard of these days, but it is rare. The simple reason is cost, as well as having to pay the designer for 5 screen layouts (per page style) you will need to pay the front end developer to code the CSS for all of the different formats.

If you have the money there are some advantages to it and because you are reusing elements it won’t be 5x the cost realistically, but expect to pay at least twice the design and programming costs if you forsake the template.

FLEXIBILITY

It may sound counter-intuitive, but a template actually allows you to be more flexible in the long term with your website.

Finally got the photographer in and you want to add a gallery page?

Starting to get a good Facebook following and want to add the latest comments onto your homepage ?

As you business grows so should your website and with a template you have the ability to add new elements in to the layout and have them responsive to the different screens without having to run back to your designer every time you need a new feature added.

GOOGLE HAPPINESS

Rumour is that Google will rank your site a little higher if it’s responsive, this may be propaganda spread by the template makers but I can believe it.

What is for sure though is that you will have your SEO managed from one place and have the same URL for your mobile and desktop websites for easy crawling.

BUT WONT MY SITE LOOK LIKE EVERYONE ELSES?

Not with a little imagination and some key elements, there is an art to working within the framework and still standing out.

And as mentioned there are hundreds of options and all of them are pretty flexible. Let’s take this website for example Brown Paper was build on the Jupiter template by Artbees (one of my personal favourites) take a look at the demo and see if you would have picked it.

http://artbees.net/themes/jupiter-demo/

Our favourite one-page-one-product client Coffee Berry Tea was sculpted from the backbone of the Apollo Shopify theme, check them out side by side to appreciate the level of creative expression in the execution:

http://www.coffeeberrytea.com.au/

http://apollo-theme.myshopify.com/

To conclude, if you have a few hours to spare duck on over to Theme Forest and wander through the endless options, all categorised and catalogued and be confident in the knowledge that every dollar you invest in a theme will save you at least ten in design and programming.

One of the great things about using Shopify as a shopping cart is the huge range of plugins to choose from. Depending which way you look at it, this can be a blessing or a curse, so this guide should give you a quick list of must have apps and how they can help you boost your online sales.

The shopify app store has hundreds of apps, with more being added regularly. Whether you‘re looking to increase sales, manage your inventory better, connect to third party software or just have a cooler looking store – as the saying goes ‘there’s an app for that’.

Here’s 10 shopify apps I’m currently in my online store.

Yotpo Social Reviews – http://apps.shopify.com/yotpo-social-reviews

Reviews are one of the most important thing shoppers look for when deciding whether to make a purchase. They help to build trust, show that your product is quality (hopefully it is), and most of all build elements of social proof around your business and products .

Yotpo take all the hassle out of generating customer reviews, by emailing your customers after they’ve made a purchase, and asks nicely for a review. You can customise everything from the email design, the text, to how many days after purchase you want to ask for a review. You can also include a coupon to further entice a review. It then sends out the reviews to your social channels which helps create more social proof around your products.

Yotpo also includes an analytics dashboard so you can see if it’s bringing in any traffic, and generating any revenue from that traffic.

It also adds the review star ratings under your products, showing customers your star ratings just as the customers are deciding whether to purchase or not – Awesome! The app is free for most features, but for $10/month you can enable the rich snippets feature – which shows your 5 star ratings in the google search results – totally worth it if you rely on google for search traffic.

Hello Bar – http://apps.shopify.com/the-hello-bar

You’ve probably seen hello bar around the web. It’s a simple plugin that enables you  to add a customisable bar at the top of you website. You can advertise your current specials, your shipping rates, just a friendly message or anything really. Hello bar is free for up to 20 click throughs per month.

Olark – http://apps.shopify.com/olark-live-chat-cartsaver

Live chat for websites is popping up more and more lately – with good reason. Anything you can do to let your customers know that they are dealing with real people and not just a webpage helps to build trust and will create more sales. Olark is a live chat support plugin that enables your customers to chat directly with you or your team while they are browsing your store.

Being able to respond straight away to customer queries is also a great way to separate yourself from competitors, show that you care, address any concerns the customer has before purchasing and gives extra confidence that you will deliver on what you say.

The plugin is customisable to suit your store’s design and also lets customers leave a message if you are not online. My favourite feature of Olark however is the detailed visitor information it gives you. So you can be notified when someone has added to their cart, how they found your site and where they are located.

Olark is free for up to 20 chats/month and then starts at $15 for the basic plan.

Contact Form http://apps.shopify.com/contact-form

If you don’t plan to offer live chat support, then Contact Form is a good alternative. It’s a basic app that creates a pop-up tab on your site, and allows visitors to leave you a message that gets sent straight to your inbox. It costs $14 once off, however there are alternatives but I haven’t found any that look as nice.

Chimpified – http://apps.shopify.com/chimpified

If you are selling online then you should be doing some form of email marketing. Whether it’s sending abandoned cart emails, special offers or just regular newsletters. Chimpified integrates with Mailchimp and automatically adds your customers to your email marketing lists inside mailchimp. The app is free and so is mailchimp for the smaller plans.

Retail Tower – http://apps.shopify.com/retailtower

If you’ve ever had to format a data feed manually then Retail Tower will save you a lot of time.

Retail Tower generates data feeds for all your products for the popular shopping comparison websites – Myshopping.com.au, shopbot.com.au, getprice.com.au as well as google shopping so you can get your products more visibility around the web. The app itself is free, however various shopping comparison websites charge a small fee for any traffic they send you.

Happy Ending – http://apps.shopify.com/happy-ending

Who doesn’t enjoy a happy ending? And it shouldn’t be any different for your valued customers as they are leaving your site. Happy ending creates customisable templates after your checkout page, that can direct them to your facebook or google plus profiles or even share their purchase on twitter. It’s a good time to get them to involved in your community while their purchase is still fresh in their mind. Happy Ending costs $6/month.

Wholesaler http://apps.shopify.com/wholesaler

If you plan to sell wholesale as well as direct to customers, then Wholesaler is a great plugin for this. It creates a wholesale registration page and lets you offer different levels of pricing to your wholesale customers, without showing your regular customers.

Refersion –http://apps.shopify.com/refersion

Refersion is an awesome app makes it super easy for any Shopify store to run their own affiliate program. It creates your own landing page for your store, with the affiliate program details and allows publishers to signup in order to promote your products. Every part of the affiliate program is customisable and you can set the commission  given, choose between a % or a Dollar amount and even the length of the cookies.

Refersion handles all the payments, which are done through paypal. You just decide when to pay your affiliates and release the payments. The price is right – with a free plan to get you started.

Refferal Candy – http://apps.shopify.com/referralcandy

I’ve just started using refferal candy, so haven’t gotten results from it yet. But I can see it’s potential, particularly if you’re products are popular on social media and something people would share. Refferal Candy essentially allows any customer to be an affiliate for your shop. They don’t need a website or email list. Once they make a purchase they are given the option to share their purchase on social media, and give a discount to their friends. For any one of their friends that makes a purchase, they get a bonus. Either a coupon for your store, or cold hard cash in their paypal account.

You can set the exact payout amounts however you like. So you need to know exactly how much a new customer is worth to you. Also keep in mind enticing customers by offering discounts upfront may not mean they are as valuable as a regular customer over the longterm.

Know any more great shopify apps? Leave a comment below!

E-commerce is easier than you think, and our how-to guide will help you get your online clothing store up and running now.

What you need to do is:

1. CHOOSE A BRAND NAME:

• Is it easy to remember
• Non-exclusive to a particular garment or style
• Available for Business Name Registration
• Available for domain names

2. GET PRODUCTS:

What are you going to sell? Shorts, shirts, dresses, skirts, shoes; all of the above?

Know your niche and target demographic. Get inside their mind. What do they want? Once you have your product don’t just release it into the online world and hope for the best. Test it.

Hold a “focus group” [for market research] to see whether people like your product. Have some friends and other opinionated people [from all age brackets and demographics] come and see your product, try it on, and give their two-cents about it. Have a list of questions ready, including what do they like/not like about the product and how much are they willing to pay for it?

A great way to start out if you have designs for clothing graphics but don’t want to print them all yourself is with The Printful, they drop ship all sorts of products featuring your designs and you can decide how much you want to charge your customers.

3. GET A SHOPPING CART:

The easiest and fastest way to get your online clothing store live is to register with a shopping cart. We use Shopify as the interface is easy to use and suits small e-commerce stores with the option to upgrade as you grow. They keep updating their templates and applications so there is heaps of flexibility and freedom to tailor your website to customers. For the 10 best Shopify apps click here.

A shopping cart is easier than self-hosting because you can have a website set up in 30 minutes through a shopping cart without having to worry about trust certificates and getting someone to design your webpage. If thinking of self-hosting you have to pay for the domain name, pay for hosting, security, webpage design, get coding done and you can’t just go in and easily edit your website when you like.

With a shopping cart software like Shopify you can go in behind the scenes and change your logos or page information, add or delete products, change freight information, choose your own credit card payment gateway and select or edit a new template store design. There’s no mucking around with html (although you have the freedom to if that’s your realm of expertise or enjoyment).

It’s so much faster and easier to get your website up and running through a shopping cart and getting your site live is first priority. You can always change to self-hosting down the track if you wish.

4. GET A DOMAIN NAME:

You can either buy a domain name [www.clothes.com] through a host or buy it through Shopify and have it all integrated. It’s worthwhile buying the additional domain endings for your site if they are available (i.e. .net; .net.au; .co etc.). It’s a small price to pay for extra security and so that if people forget the ending of your website they can still reach it.

5. PUT PRODUCTS ON YOUR SITE:

So now that you have a website you can start uploading products to sell (although before you’re ready to go live you may want to set up a landing page/under construction banner).

Useful pages to have on your website include:

• ABOUT US
• COLLECTIONS
  • WOMENS
  • MENS
  • DESIGNERS
  • CATEGORIES
• SIZING
• FAQs
• RETURNS & SHIPPING
• CONTACT US
• BLOG

You’ll need photos of products, including descriptions (pricing, sizing, colour etc.) which all adds to SEO so don’t just skip over this part. It will take time but if you do it right now it will save a lot of time later on.

Be sure to include a sizing chart, especially if including international shipping. Have both a measurement chart (in centimetres) and an international conversion chart.

6. UPLOAD SITE INFORMATION:

Now that you have pages on your website you need to upload information correspondingly.

If you want to integrate Google Shopping with your products you need to get the categories right otherwise Google won’t use them. For more information on Google Shopping click here.

When writing product descriptions and page content it is important to integrate with keywords so that your site is optimised for Google. You’ll need to use Google Keyword Planner which is part of a Google Adwords account. Basically you can see what the monthly search volume is for a specific word or phrase, and if there is much competition for these search results. The aim is to pick ones which have a high search volume but which are low in competition.

You can use adwords here so that an ad pops up at the top of Google. The less competition there is the cheaper the adwords will be. You have to make sure that you are targeting people who are looking to buy, not just those searching for information on a specific product or designer.

Be creative and interesting with site content; you need both quality and quantity. Know your demographic and write for them; use jargon which is suitable for your audience.

7. INTEGRATE PAYPAL:

So your products are uploaded with prices and descriptions, pages are finalised with stimulating and optimised content. Now it’s time to integrate PayPal (or another payment gateway of your choosing). This is easy to do through Shopify.

8. SET UP SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• YouTube
• Tumblr
• LinkedIn
• Google+

At least get the usernames for all the above social media websites even if you don’t end up using them. Your target demographic will dictate which ones you use primarily but target Facebook, Twitter and Instagram initially. Have similar content to your website but slightly different, but maybe more personalised and socially directed.

9. PROMOTIONAL STRATEGY

• Social media strategy:

After acquiring social media accounts you need to think about a strategy which targets your market demographic. What hash tags will you use, will you run competitions to increase sharing, will you build an online community and hold one-off events for your followers/customers?

Write down a list of things you would like to do through social media and break it down into daily tasks. Draw up a schedule and set a reminder so you don’t forget to post regularly. Think of ways to create interesting content which you can post across all channels of social media. Include photos, write quirky things and don’t just sell. Be creative because at the end of the day people aren’t going to buy from you if you just push them to buy all the time. Build a relationship with your followers and you’ll have more chance of getting repeat customers and recommendations.

• Advertising:

You may also want to inquire about advertising online on a specific website or in an e-newsletter to reach more people. Costs vary depending on the type and placement of the advertising as well as the reputation of the website and how well-known it is. Advertising on blogs is quite popular but can be more expensive than banner advertising on a site. Responses vary so you’ll want to research and compare the input vs. output cost and outcome.

• Markets:

Another promotional strategy is to have a stall or a pop-up stall at local markets. Not everyone is a fan of online shopping so if you go to markets and people see, try on, and buy your clothes, they are far more likely to buy from you online. It is a way of getting known in the local community and spreading via word-of-mouth. Building credibility online takes time so to help speed the process strengthen the relationship between you and your customers, markets can be a sure-fire way to accomplish this.

10. LAUNCH TIME

So probably by now you’re at a stage where you are ready or close to being ready to launch your product or clothing label. There are a series of things you can do to promote yourself further by launching and getting your name out there:

• Live website
• Hype (YouTube video) – circulate via social media
• Launch party with some industry people
• Blog post/news article on your new brand