# where and how to sell my shirts online



## nowitsshowtime (Jan 19, 2008)

Well to start off, I make all the shirts myself, so no need for something like cafepress etc.

I currently just finished the website, but the store part is proving to be the trickiest. 

First off, what do you think about using paypal. Personally I like it because EVERYONE has an acct, its simple and easy for everyone, even internationally, especially with the verification. Drawback is some people think its not as profesional (and they are charging $1.25 per transaction) A merchant acct. will cost me as well, but as a buyer, I hate having to sign up at a website for one item.

Aside from that, are there any websites where I just send the image, details, and they compile the info for me on their own page.

Maybe something like Big Cartel, or please recomend others. Or does this look very amateur. As well. 

Looking for something fast and easy for the buyer, clean and profesional, and hopefully somewhat easy to set up (I know thats a lot to ask for)


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## etctees (Oct 11, 2007)

I think PayPal is fine. Slowly but surely, eBay is pushing all of their users to have PayPal as the only acceptable means of payment. eBay being one of the largest and more familiar online shopping experiences for customers, you will find that the general shopping population is fine to use PayPal. Besides, you don't even need a PayPal account to pay by PayPal - you can do a "once-off" payment using your credit card. So from a buyers point of view, PayPal is 100% fine.

As a seller, unless you're doing a large volume of sales, opening a credit card processing account with a bank or financial institution proves to be a little bit too much money/work, and I ended up settling with PayPal payments.

As for the "cart" side of things, you should really check out the free eCommerce packages available. I use a cart called Virtuemart which is a component add-on for Joomla, and if you know the basics of HTML/CSS you can customize pretty much everything you want. Some easier and less fancier options are thinks like Cubecart, Zencart, osCommerce... I'm sure if you go to the eCommerce forums there will be many more options shown, as the topic has been discussed quite a lot.


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## etctees (Oct 11, 2007)

Just thought I would add this - depending on what sort of shirts you sell, an eBay store is by no means out of the question. It's a task all on its own to try to get people to find your site - on eBay, the customers are all ready searching for what they're interested in, you just need to fill in the blanks. I sell my funny, slogan type designs on eBay, and my site contains both these and other, brand-based designs. I get a fair spread of sales amongst both, but the sales are far easier to generate on eBay. I have it set up so anyone searching for "wii games" or "wii console" sees my listing for a wii-themed shirt, and same thing for other games related shirts. I was surprised how well it works.


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## tofumeow (Apr 7, 2008)

I would suggest getting a free website from a host like freehostia, I'm currently using their service too, seems to be quite stable. One down side is no out-going email for their free package, so you might want to upgrade it after you have tried it out. 

Then install a free ecommerce package, there are many of them available on the web. I played with osCommerce a bit a while ago, seems to be ok. It supports paypal too.


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## spudlauncher (Aug 9, 2007)

If you are planning to sell your shirts online, I wouldn't recommend using one of those free hosting sites. FOr the most part they look unprofessional and sketchy. They usually have those annoing ads as well.

It is better to either buy a nice template or hire someone to design your site for you. It won't be cheap, but then again, put yourself in your customers shoes.

Would you really buy from a sketchy looking site?


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## etctees (Oct 11, 2007)

spudlauncher said:


> If you are planning to sell your shirts online, I wouldn't recommend using one of those free hosting sites. FOr the most part they look unprofessional and sketchy. They usually have those annoing ads as well.
> 
> It is better to either buy a nice template or hire someone to design your site for you. It won't be cheap, but then again, put yourself in your customers shoes.
> 
> Would you really buy from a sketchy looking site?


This is another reason eBay can be popular - if your target market falls into the tech-wary 40+ age of shopper, who is scared to trust sites that look a bit dodgy. They know they can trust eBay. For similar reasons, some people do their shopping only via Cafepress and other fulfillment sites, so you may want to look into these options as well.


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## nowitsshowtime (Jan 19, 2008)

Thanks for the replies so far. I think I will try a few sales on ebay just to get the name out there as well, but I feel like selling on ebay also can affect brand image as well. 

Big cartel looks good and looks professional, but I should be selling more than 5 shirts a month, meaning I would have to pay $9 or $19. I would rather try to avoid that if tehre is another one cheaper or free. I guess its not that much, but I want to keep my shirts as reasonable as possible. Havin to ship (going priority to US, costs $5) puts the shirt into a new price bracket and doesn't look as enticing to consumers. While lets say if I sell 10 shirts a month, between that and the paypal fee, it sucks Im loosing $2 per sale right away. If nothing else and no other store looks good, I may go this way.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

> First off, what do you think about using paypal. Personally I like it because EVERYONE has an acct, its simple and easy for everyone, even internationally, especially with the verification. Drawback is some people think its not as profesional (and they are charging $1.25 per transaction)


Some of the drawbacks of using "just" PayPal are:

not everyone has a PayPal account
some people hate PayPal for one reason or another
their shopping cart isn't very user friendly
their shopping cart doesn't offer a lot of shipping options.
A customer has to leave your site and get transferred to a third party site to make a purchase. That can turn off some buyers.

Why you should include PayPal as part of the types of payments you accept:

Because, like you said, it seems like everyone has an account.
People with PayPal accounts like to use those accounts to buy stuff.




> A merchant acct. will cost me as well, but as a buyer, I hate having to sign up at a website for one item.


I'm not sure what you meant here, but if you have a merchant account, the buyer won't have to signup at a website to buy anything from you. 

Just the opposite. With a merchant account, the buyer never has to leave your site or signup for anything. Looks much more professional.



> Aside from that, are there any websites where I just send the image, details, and they compile the info for me on their own page.
> 
> Maybe something like Big Cartel, or please recomend others. Or does this look very amateur. As well.


Big Cartel actually sounds like it might be a good choice for you.

Another option is to build your own website.

But if you are looking for super fast and easy, I think BigCartel might be the way to go for you.

If it was me, I'd setup a shopping cart on my existing site using cubecart. It's not too hard, and you won't have to keep paying for it once you have it setup.


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## georgiatshirts (Mar 26, 2014)

I would go with martuy. A mart where you can sell and buy. Try it.


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## teehugger (Jul 6, 2015)

> First off, what do you think about using paypal.


you should consider paypal essential, but should not use it exclusively. not everyone has paypal and if it's all you use, then you'll drive customers away. you should aim to accept paypal and the major credit cards.

i'd suggest reading these 7 excellent books (i've read twice these in lousy books too) if you really want to do it right with your website

*5/5 Search Engine Optimization for Dummies* – Peter Kent
Don’t let the title fool you, this is a serious text full of essential information by a knowledgeable author who gets right to the point without a bunch of useless fluff like so many authors, though he does throw a joke in here and there. Most of the info isn’t too technical and is easy to read. I took pages of notes on what was covered (my definition of what makes ANY business book important) and in the end, felt as though I knew more than even some alleged SEO experts and web designers. Consider it essential reading whether you’re building your site yourself, or telling your programmer what tags and keywords etc. you want on every page.

*5/5 Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate guide to Link Building* – Eric Ward & Garret French
Is a perfect companion to SEO for Dummies as it covers different territory, but does add a couple SEO tips of its own to the mix. Sometimes it gets a little technical, and tends to be aimed at larger companies, but it’s still a goldmine of crucial info for any e-commerce site owner. UNLIKE crappy books like Guerilla PR Wired, and Epic Content Marketing, this one actually thrown in some inspiration on how to come up with interesting content. The author doesn’t just stick to the subject of link building, but provides tons of great info and ideas.

*5/5 e-Commerce: Get It Right!* – Ian Daniel
Offers a lot of great info on what it takes to create a successful e-commerce site along with some basic SEO tips. About the only thing I DIDN’T like about the book was the author totally dismissing the idea of owners creating their own websites and insists on hiring expensive programmers. To make up for it though, he makes himself available with a direct e-mail link so that you can ask questions directly. Perhaps this is the FIRST book one should read when thinking about starting a website selling anything.

*5/5 Get Rich Click!* The Ultimate Guide to Making Money on the Internet - Marc Ofstofsky
It might sound like the title of a book in some sleazy “get rich quick scheme” infomercial, but this book is full of practical tips on how to improve your website along with some nice original SEO tips not covered in other books. It even offers ideas on alternative business models so some readers can make money in affiliate programs, for example, using nothing but the info in this book. On it’s own, it had more useful info than 3-4 other crappy e-Commerce books combined. It’s an excellent supplement to the 3 previous books.

*5/5 Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers* – Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares the books starts off really slow in the first few chapters & covers commonly discussed marketing channels, but really takes off when it starts comparing them. For example, it does an excellent job of comparing various social media banner ads and goes beyond the standard FaceBook/Twitter/LinkedIn discussion every other book covers and talks about the value of emerging channels. It’s a great shopper’s guide for what marketing options are available with tons of great UNIQUE suggestions and even offers inspiration. It TOTALLY destroys Epic Content Marketing and Guerilla PR Wired and a few other books combined.

Another example of a REALLY juicy piece of info involves magazine ads. One of the better books I read, Small Buisness Bible I think, mentioned that it's possible to get deals on unused remnant ad space. Until now, wherever I read it was the only place that mentioned this nice tip, but I got nowhere with it when talking to the magazine I was planning to target my first ad in. Traction, however, passes this info along too with another juicy CRITICAL nugget that there are ad agencies out there that specialize in finding remnant space!

*5/5 Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website* – Jon Rognerud covers much of the same territory as other e-commerce books (eg. SEO, keywords, link building and social media), but does so with a very unique perspective adding TONS of new and up to date tips and tricks others miss. It’s loaded with great resources too, and like E-commerce: Get It Right!, the author provides personal contact info and openly encourages readers to contact him many times on virtually every topic throughout the book! Sometimes it gets a little technical or scatters bits of related info between chapters eg. 3 different lists of directories to submit your website to, but overall, it’s an amazing resource as either a really deep primer on building a successful site, or as a supplement to a stack of the best books on e-commerce and SEO. It is simply a GOLD MINE of info… even too much to remember or even take notes on eg. What to look for in a webhost.

*4/5 Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insight from the MOZ Blog* - Rand Fishkin & Thomas Hogerhaven sometimes gets technical and sometimes doesn’t explain content adequately, eg. Using schema.org “markup vocabulary” to enhance your SEO, though it’s the ONLY book I’ve read that ever even mentions this new innovation. It also very often lists links to outside sources for more info making it less useful without net access, but it covers a lot of original content not in other books provided by dozens of experts at MOZ Blog. It’s an excellent supplement to the other books listed.

the latest "things" in e-commerce are conversion and the "trust funnel". i haven't read any books on those yet as they're too new to get by interlibrary loans here, but i've read some favorable amazon reviews for books on those topics


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