Start An Online

T-Shirt Business:

The Ultimate

Guide

T-shirt business in ten steps

1. Find a niche

2. Nail down your designs

3. Choose a T-shirt

4. Make your mock-ups

5. Choose a printer or drop shipper

6. Choose an e-commerce platform…

7. …and make it yours

8. Get marketing

9. Get testing

10. Get learning

Find a niche

If you are reading this, it probably has not

escaped your notice that the online T-shirt

market is a very crowded one, so

identifying a corner of it that is not yet

catered for is vital to the success of your

business. Small cities, towns and villages,

obscure pastimes and underrepresented

sports are all good places to start.

Nail down your designs.

While designs do not need to cost the Earth

or be particularly intricate, no one will buy

a T-shirt that does not look the part. You

can find inspiration for designs on custom

T-shirt stores such as and independent

marketplaces such as .

Choose a T-shirt

You have got your designs, now you

need a T-shirt to put them on; take

quality, style and type into account,

although this will partly be determined

by what the printer or drop

shipper you choose stocks.

Make your mock-ups

You will struggle to shift T-shirts if your customers

cannot see what your designs look like on them,

so you will need to apply your designs to a T-shirt

template. Hundreds of these, both free and those

you will have to pay for, are available online, but

obviously, the better the template, the better

your T-shirts will look in your store, making them

more appealing to customers.

Choose a printer or drop

shipper

Now your T-shirts exist digitally, you

will want someone to make them

and get them to customers, which is

where printers and drop shippers –

manufacturers or wholesalers

that ship directly to customers –

come in.

Choose an e-commerce platform…

That brings us neatly onto selecting a

place from which to sell your T-shirts.

There are a lot of options out there,

including those that specialise in

designing and selling T-shirts, such

as ,but these prevent you from doing

your own branding, marketing and

conversion optimisation.

And make it yours The beauty of Shopify is that you can increase

your sales through branding and marketing using

We Make Websites, the highest-rated Shopify

experts in the UK. We Make Websites can create a

design for your online T-shirt business that will

give customers a responsive, reliable experience

whether they are using a desktop computer, a

smartphone or something in between, helping you

to both build traffic and convert it.

Get marketing Just because you are enlisting experts to help you with

getting word on your online T-shirt business out, it does

not mean that you cannot make a start yourself. Do some

research to see if any opportunities to market your T-

shirts present themselves. Are there any events coming up

that you could use to gain some visibility? Are there any

newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs or online

communities covering the niche your designs fulfil whose

audiences would like to hear about them? Can you identify

any keywords that people who would be interested in your

T-shirts might look for that you could base your SEO

strategy on?

Get TestingConduct a test order to ensure that

everything on your website is working;

after all your hard work, the last thing

you want is to be directing customers

to it only for them to find that

they cannot spend their money when

they get there because they cannot

checkout or validate payments.

Get learning Do not rest on your laurels just because your first few

orders have started to come in – there is a lot that you

can learn once you have built your online T-shirt

business. How to Start an Online T-Shirt Business: The

Ultimate Guide by Richard Lazazzera is a good place to

kick things off, while taking a course could be really

helpful, so get 25 per cent off our ‘How to build a

sucessful e-commerce business’ for learning.ly,

presented by We Make Websitesco-founder Alex O’Byrne -

just enter code: ecommerce25 at the checkout.