How to make a clothing website successful to get high profits

As one of the most popular ecommerce niches, the online fashion industry is always considered as  a multi-billion-a-year industry. With huge sales, about $759 billion in 2021 and projections of $1 trillion by 2025, the clothing online commerce industry is an extremely potential and fertile one. In case you are a newbie planning to launch an ecommerce clothing website, you’ve come to the right destination. In this article, Arrowtheme will walk you through how to make a clothing website successful, covering the key elements to launching a successful online clothing business. So, explore with us right now! 

How to make a clothing website to gain higher profits?

Step 1. Research market and select the right online clothing niche

To begin, you must pick the garment or clothing niche you wish to sell before deciding your products. In fact, choosing your specialization guarantees that your entire clothing line business plan will be around potential customers you want to attract. As a result, it will definitely help you to position your fashion online store in a unique and special way. 

What’s more, the key is you have to drill down into your niche. Because this will make it easier for you to find and market to right potential clients. Not only that, this will also assist you in developing your product list to appeal to your unique target market. As a result, you are able to restrict competition and increase more long-term relationships with loyal customers. 

Step 2. Select items for your online clothing store

The next stage you must carefully do in order to make a clothing website successful is choose suitable products for your store. Have you thought about what you will sell? In general, the clothes and apparel market is nearly limitless, and you can be sure that any area you’re selling in has a plethora of possibilities. However, if you do not have a thorough preparation and want to start selling immediately, you will very easily fail. When beginning an online store, it’s always a good idea to start modestly and gradually expand your product offerings. So, what factors should you consider when choosing products for your fashion online store? Let’s refer to them below:

#1. You should start small

Starting small and simple is something a lot of brands have done when building their product line, and they have succeeded. In reality, adding too many products in the first place will not only increase your administrative expenditures throughout the process, but it will also complicate your launch. Besides, poor customer service, or the lack thereof, can make a new store like yours face a lot of competition in the large market. 

#2. Predict and keep pace of the change in the future

Not as similar as many other fields, the fashion and apparel industry is constantly changing. Hence, all you need to do is choose stable products first, such as bow ties or t-shirts, that can be readily modified to meet shifting styles. Moreover, if you do decide to go with more mainstream fashion, you should make sure to plan for shifting styles by developing a store that can adapt. For instance, dropshipping orders help you will never have an inventory situation. Most crucially, you must remember that there will always be adjustments in the apparel industry. Therefore, your ability to look ahead and be original and creative in dealing with them will determine your success.

#3. Set your main business goal

At the first stage, you need to be as particular and narrow as possible, but keep the overall aim in mind. Besides, let’s consider how you want your online apparel brand to grow in the future, and make sure you’re focused on the ultimate result. Moreover, as you add products to your line and expand your store in your specialty, you’ll be able to more easily integrate new or popular products into your business. 

Step 3. Choose a business model for your online clothing store 

After completing two steps above, now is the time to choose the best online clothes business model for your online store. Simply speaking, this is where you determine whether you will create your clothes business with a garment manufacturer, white labeling, or dropshipping. In the market, there are four main types of online clothing stores as below that you can consider. Each online business model has its own set of advantages as well as disadvantages. Hence, choosing between them should be dependent on your overall fashion store goal and budget, as well as your ability or willingness to hire a crew.

#1. Print-on-demand

When it comes to business models for online clothing stores, the first model you need to know is Print-on-demand. Simply speaking, print-on-demand refers to shops where you can have your logo and design printed on blank t-shirts, and everything is automated. In fact, this is the simplest and cheapest sort of online garment business concept. Besides, the T-shirt printing demand has always been there and has never decreased. In particular, by 2025, custom t-shirt printing is estimated to generate $10 billion in revenue. Additionally, within this business kind, there is adequate diversity in terms of types and colors. Best of all, it is the most cost-effective alternative when dealing with small orders. 

However, this business model still has limitations. The most significant disadvantage of this approach is that it typically has lower profit margins and offers limited branding, labeling, and other finishing options.

#2. Custom cut-and-sew 

This business model is ideal for any store owner who wishes to start their own clothing line and construct an online boutique. Best of all, custom cut-and-sew business strategy is the perfect choice for people who want to start from the ground up and create a comprehensive clothing line. In particular, with the custom cut-and-sew model, you do everything on your own, from designing your outfits to producing and fulfilling them. 

Furthermore, its main advantage is that you’re offering something truly unique that you can personalize to your liking. On the other hand, it requires a lot of management because you will be in charge of locating and arranging your own pattern designers and manufacturers, as well as sourcing your own fabric. This means you must invest lots of money and time up front to launch your initial line.

#3. Private label

Private label business models are essentially a hybrid of print-on-demand and cut-and-sew operations. Although they offer more clothing line customisation than the former, they require less effort and cash. Essentially, you will be purchasing wholesale clothes and accessory items to sell and advertise under your own fashion label.

Besides, when it comes to the process of private labeling wholesale clothing, you acquire wholesale apparel goods that are blank or without labels. Then, you can customize them with your own design, label, or tag before selling them in your online store. Best of all, if you may negotiate better pricing for bulk purchases, this can be a lot more cost-effective than print-on-demand. 

However, it has certain disadvantages, such as having to handle fulfillment and inventory management on your own. However, there are services that may help you speed the process by allowing you to buy and custom-finish your clothing items. 

#4. Dropshipping

Dropshipping clothing companies allow you to sell clothing that is fulfilled by wholesalers. In fact, this model is a cost-effective option because you won’t have to worry about purchasing inventory up front, storing it, packing it, or delivering it. However, its limitations is that your products will be less distinctive, and there may be multiple stores selling the same items as you. In general, setting up is rather simple. All you have to do is identify and arrange a large number of suppliers using tools like Oberlo, and then integrate them into your ecommerce store. 

Step 4. Create a business plan for your online clothing store

As soon as you have a niche, products, and business model, the next step to make a clothing website successful is to outline your business plan. The factors you must pay attention to build an effective business plan are:

• Target market: you should segment your potential customers into niche markets or fashion audiences
• Products: determining what distinguishes them
• Main competitors: listing your top competitors 
• Model and fulfillment strategies for online businesses 
• Brand identity and clothing company description: how you want your target market to view your fashion store brand. 

Moreover, when coming to eCommerce strategy, you want to ensure that you’re answering questions like where your traffic will come from and how your products will appeal to that audience. Furthermore, you must put your pricing in your company plan. Following that, let’s consider the following major clothing line cost elements when determining the pricing per product:

• Equipment, web development, hosting, etc
• Design and development
• Cost of production per product, including sample costs
• Transportation and labor
• Materials

As soon as you know your costs, you can figure out your margins. Generally, it should be between 30 and 50 percent in case you’re employing cut-and-sew models. However, you should be looking at your major competitors’ pricing at this point to make sure your prices are in line with the overall market. 

Step 5. Make a clothing website 

Entering to the next step to make a clothing website successful, you must require a domain name. You should purchase this separately as soon as you have a core idea. After creating your range and building your site, double-check that the domain is still available and unique. Best of all, you can purchase a domain using eCommerce systems like Shopify or WordPress. 

After that, you will need to decide on a platform and then choose a theme that is tailored for your products. When it comes to setting up your store, this is one of the most crucial considerations you will have to make. You can refer to the most popular eCommerce website and store builder options such as: Shopify, Woocommerce (WordPress), Magento, Wix, BigCommerce and so much more. 

Now, we will give you the step-to-step to make a clothing website successful with WordPress. 

How to generate a fashion website with WordPress? 

#1. Purchasing a domain name and Web hosting 

If you are planning to build any website, a domain name and web hosting are the first things you must think about. For more details, a domain name is the internet address for your website. It is the address that your website’s visitors type into their browsers to go to your site. Typically, the cost of a domain name is roughly $15 per month. 

In terms of web hosting, this is the place where  people keep the content and files of their websites. Plus, when someone enters in your website address (domain name), they will be taken to the files stored on your web hosting server. Then, you must prepare roughly $9 per month to pay for a WordPress hosting account. 

As soon as you buy the web hosting, you are able to continue and set up WordPress on your hosting account. 

#2. Installing WordPress for your clothing website

You will need to install the CMS to connect your new domain to your website in case you’re using a hosting provider that isn’t WordPress.

On the other hand, if you are utilizing a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine or Kinsta, you won’t have to go through this procedure. This is because those services were developed particularly for WordPress and will have WordPress installed for you.

Once you have set up your domain and installed WordPress, you will need to set up your “Primary Domain” in WordPress. Thanks to that, your visitors can find your website when they search your domain. Then, you must go to My Site and click Domains in WordPress. After that, choose which custom domain you want to use as your primary domain. 

Then, let’s click “Make Primary”.

Then, by selecting “Update Primary Domain”, you can confirm that you wanted to make this change.

After that, you must look for a green box with a tick that indicates Primary Domain to see if the upgrade was successful. 

#3. Choose the suitable theme

After setting up WordPress, you will need to pick a theme that meets your clothing website’s needs. Best of all, WordPress comes with hundreds of free and premium themes in all different styles. So, let’s pick any of the themes that you can see right now to avoid wasting time. Because after you’ve set up WordPress, you can always change the theme as you want. 

You should choose a ​good fashion theme that makes it easy to add photos, portfolios, and material to your website. Besides, for your blog and landing pages, it should have various page templates.

#4. Uploading images and content

The next step you must do is add photographs and contents to your clothing website before making it public. As you know, having enough content usually takes some time. Hence, you may also link your social account, such as Instagram to your website and share photographs directly from it with your visitors. Best of all, you can easily embed your Instagram feed anywhere on your WordPress site using Smash Balloon’s Instagram Feed Pro. 

Additionally, you will also need to create website pages such as: About us, Services, and Contact Form pages. In order to do that, you can take advantage of a page builder plugin like SeedProd or Beaver Builder. These drag-and-drop page builders will assist you in quickly creating landing pages and adding content.

Furthermore, you should also start a blog and develop a content plan to ensure that you publish articles on a regular basis. In addition, on the homepage and landing pages, you are able to create professional image galleries. The top picture gallery plugins for WordPress include features such as image style, lightbox popup, and more. 

#5. Making your clothing website SEO friendly

To make a clothing website successful, you can’t ignore the step of making your website SEO friendly. When your website is complete, you must ensure it is accessible to anyone seeking fashion-related products and information. All you have to do is optimize and make your website search engine friendly. As a result, your fashion website will have a great opportunity to show up in Google search results. 

Although WordPress websites are SEO friendly, you should still optimize more factors. Following that, there are a few actions you can do to guarantee that your site is seen to anyone searching for fashion-related material. Moreover, you can refer to SEO best practices including optimizing for speed and performance. In particular, when users visit your website and it loads swiftly, they get a great first impression that lasts a long time. For speeding up your website, you can utilize WordPress caching plugins like WP Rocket. 

Then, you must track user activity on your website in order to deeply understand your target demographic. Tracking will assist you in gaining a better understanding of user behavior and where they are losing interest. To do that, you will need to install Google analytics on your clothing website. The analytics will show you all of the information about the pages your users have visited and the actions they have performed. Furthermore, if the majority of your website visitors leave from a single page, you need to address the problem and make that page more user-friendly. You may also optimize your entire site for search engines with a plugin like All in One SEO. This plugin offers you a score for how well your pages and posts are optimized for your target keywords, as well as a list of modifications you can make to improve your rankings. 

#6. Earn money from your clothing website 

You can make money from your fashion website in a variety of ways. Now, let’s take a look at a handful of them as we recommend below. 

• Google AdSense

This is a Google-owned advertising network that allows fashion bloggers and website owners to monetise their sites by showing text, image, video, and other interactive adverts. There are many other ad platforms that you may use to gain money by advertising ads on your website.

• Affiliate marketing

Affiliate programs are run by top fashion brands and apparel stores. Simply speaking, it means you may promote their products and receive a fee every time a sale is made. Besides, you might also make affiliate marketing easy for yourself by using some of the top affiliate marketing plugins. 

• Sell direct ads 

With direct ads, you won’t have to share ad earnings with a third-party ad network like Google AdSense. 

Step 6. Launch your clothing website 

Now, you have everything: your products are in place, your online business plan is in place, fulfillment is organized, and your website is complete. This is the best time for opening your online clothes store. 

Create a launch strategy 

• Are you planning a promotion? 
• Do you want to do a Facebook Live video? 
• To send teaser mailers, why not use an existing email database?

Whatever method you choose, you must make sure it’s ready to roll out in stages when you launch. Before launching your online clothing store, this should comprise things like proofreading and testing its entire operation.  

Prepare your social media accounts

Not only that, you also ensure that your social media account pages are configured and ready before you launch your site. This will enable you to run social media ads in conjunction with the launch and market your new store to a huge number of audience. Besides, remember to include your content marketing strategy in your strategy to create engagement and brand loyalty among your fashion audience. 

Build a plan for email marketing and automation 

Furthermore, don’t forget to make sure all of your automation emails are set up and tested. And, you have a three-month email marketing strategy in place. 

Set up Google Analytics and Google Ads Accounts 

Before launching, double-check that you’ve set up your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts. This will allow you to keep track of visits to your clothing store in real time during its launch and drive traffic using SERP ads. 

Create marketing strategy

Before, during, and after the launch of your online clothes business, you’ll want to have a marketing strategy in place. A successful eCommerce marketing strategy should incorporate a number of different channels and tactics. This includes the following: 

• Content marketing strategy  
• PPC marketing strategy 
• SEO marketing strategy 
• Email marketing strategy 

Step 7. Increase traffic for your clothing website

In fact, Email marketing, PPC, content marketing, social media, guest articles on famous blogs, and influencers are the top traffic generators. You may want to focus on Google Ads for eCommerce and social media ads to drive potential consumers to your new store. More importantly, remember to include Instagram sponsored posts in your influencer marketing paid collaborations. 

In conclusion

This article gives you a comprehensive process that instructs you how to make a clothing website successful with simple steps. Arrowtheme hopes that the knowledge we bring will be useful to you and help your store quickly get high profits and have a leg up in the global market. Then, in case you have any question on this topic, don’t hesitate to CONTACT US instantly.