One business that has caught the interest of multiple people is selling custom or company merchandise online. Looking at it from an economic point of view, it makes absolute sense as well. After all, you don’t have to have any inventory, to begin with, the orders can be made quickly post the request has been placed. There are so many offline retailers with whom one can tie up and with the help of online store builders like Unizap, shipping, and account management becomes easy too.
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However, setting up a business, even if it is of selling merchandise online is easier said than done. So, let us look at the four major steps that will make sure that your online store or app is slated for success.
1. Know Your Audience Inside Out
More than anything else, this step is important because the entire collection that you will keep or the look and feel that you will give will depend entirely on what your audience is like. The logic here is simple, company merchandise or even custom merchandise, in general, is not something that you can persuade someone to buy. They will either buy it or not so don’t even try a push-based selling approach.
Make sure that you do enough market research and are able to locate the ideal demographics as well as the sociographic characteristics of your audience. It would be a good step if you plan for and do some focus group or mall surveys too. Once you have the details, you can then decide whether you want to go more for t-shirts, hoodies, and other clothing items or want to go for lesser-priced items like mugs, hats, or stationery.
As we mentioned before, their preferences will play a significant role in defining the design and architecture of your products too.
2. Know the Competition
Pretty much rooted in a cliche but also very crucial given custom merchandise aren’t impulse purchases but their ticket size doesn’t justify too much attention too. The biggest challenge though is that there are plenty of customers who have already made a purchase from somewhere and hence will not necessarily turn to you. However, this is the very pool that you have to drive the sales for your online merchandise store from. So, start with doing what your competitors did. Try and understand their trade secrets if you can, follow them on social media and read their blogs. The more you’ll know them, the easier it will be for you to price your products and define your marketing strategy.
3. Choose it Right
We have mentioned it earlier in a passing manner, however, choosing the right category will define a lot of your operational and other costs. For instance, shipping a t-shirt can be done in a basic bag, however, if you are shipping mugs or other such delicate items, you will have to purchase thermocol cases, and an additional higher GSM, three to five layered corrugated boxes. So, you see, how much will your choice of a product determine your entire revenues, overheads, and everything?
Also, you will have to heed the quality standards too, which again will determine how much margins can you keep for yourself before becoming too pricy for the end-user.
4. Set up an Online store
Once you are done with all the research and strategy, the next step is to own an online store. Now, you can either go all out, spend heavily and create a website or you can act smart, use an online store builder like Unizap and start generating the initial revenues. The good thing about selling branded company merchandise online through an online store builder is that you don’t just get a store, but also a lot of services. For instance, at Unizap, we provide an integrated payment model, delivery partners, and round-the-clock support that can help you ease through any of the troubles that you might face.
So basically, the only thing that you will have to focus on will be to get the product ready, the rest of the operations will be taken care of by Unizap. So, you see, these were some of the very basic but key things that need to be kept in mind if one is looking at selling branded company merchandise online.
The good news is, at Unizap, we can also help you with the entire digital strategy, and marketing efforts too. Get in touch with us today to know more.
