# Gallery site vs. retail site, wholesale vs. retail



## sharps (Nov 14, 2007)

I havent decided yet whether I want to sell wholesale, retail, or both. This lack of decision has left me stuck on website design, whether to create a gallery type site or one focused around a shopping cart.

I want to approach buyers, but feel it is important to have a clear powerful website before I approach the wholesalers. So one of my questions is whether any carts offer a gallery only function where I can turn on and off actual selling.

Otherwise I want to create my site using CSS, so if I now create my gallery site under CSS and later decide to integrate a shopping cart is this possible?

Tricky questions, thanks for your help!


----------



## SeasonEnds (Sep 9, 2007)

Dennis, if you have the right skills you can make a site that can serve both purposes. 

I am not too familiar with many carts, but why would you want to offer clothes online and then randomly turn that option off? This could confuse and upset your customers.

You can add a cart later. It would be better for you to incorporate a cart into your design later down the road than do it now and decide you don't want one.


----------



## mshakir (Jul 7, 2006)

Making a website to handle both retail and wholesale orders is easy. Deal each item as package. One shirt is one package and one dozen shirt as another package. Customer pick one or the other in your cart and you are ready to go.

The bigger issue is, did you think about whether you want to run your business as retail or wholesale? Both business run differently.

In retail, your inventory is much lower. As a result, you need less space and less investment. You may not have to sell any thing on credit. People can pay for their orders, as payments are smaller.

Wholesale is a different game. You need much higher inventory, storage and investment. Margins are much lower too. Unless you move lots of goods quickly, your income may not pay your expense.

Wholesale in large quantity may require credit to customers. Therefore, you need much larger investment. Lately, the customers payments are slow, so your money can be tied up for long time.

So try to come up with a business plan. This will give you a chance to think about all aspects of each business. Then you can decide which is better for you.


----------



## sharps (Nov 14, 2007)

Tremendous, thank you for your advice and help both Eric and Mohammed. I am having a tough time making this decision and distinction because I do all the manufacturing myself.

My market is for all natural and environmentally friendly apparel launching with our screened tshirts. The procurement of my raw materials and the steps from designing, cutting, sewing, dyeing, and printing are expensive and lengthy. I would want a buyer commitment before investing in a big order to avoid piled up inventory and debt. I somehow feel selling to stores will offer me the most success (wholesale).

The all-natural sector is very young and untested. I have put a lot of time isolating my target market, designing a trendy garment, and negotiating with factories for our sample production.

Im at the point to find buyers, hopefully the "better than" fashion boutiques here in Southern California. Before I send emails and make calls, the website is my next step to re-address.


----------



## sunnydayz (Jun 22, 2007)

If you are concerned about having the retail and wholesale on one site why not just have two sites? Set up the retail site with a shopping cart and set up you wholesale site without, more like a gallery. You could probably get 2 domains with similar names such as .com and .net, use the .com for your retail and the .net for your gallery. Just a thought.


----------



## 4oclockteetime (Dec 30, 2007)

sunnydayz said:


> If you are concerned about having the retail and wholesale on one site why not just have two sites? Set up the retail site with a shopping cart and set up you wholesale site without, more like a gallery. You could probably get 2 domains with similar names such as .com and .net, use the .com for your retail and the .net for your gallery. Just a thought.


I agree, maybe two sites will do it for you. My guess is since the per unit profit is better if you sell retail it may be beneficial to you to have a retail site running while you are prep'ing for your big wholesale campaign. The other upside to it is you can get a bit of a feel I think for your tees that are most popular. I would imagine that it would be conducive to establishing good wholesale accounts when you can legitimately say which of your tees move best out in the consumer market. 

The other option which another person told me about is that some of the shopping carts you could be using have a login feature and a groups feature. With this, you can assign your wholesale customers to a "wholesale group" in which they would see your wholesale prices while the average visitor/customer would see your retail prices.

I am curious to know which route you finally choose to take because I too am in the midsts of making that very same decision and so far, I think I am going with both: My site is a gallery format BUT it has a shop attached to it and will also have a private area for my store buyers that will contain news, updates and the release date and pics of up-coming shirts that can be pre-ordered and so on...

Good luck!


----------



## sharps (Nov 14, 2007)

So this is what I decided and am in the works on. I will have my main site as the gallery highlighting the new recent products, and with all our company's information. I will then have various links to shop now, and will setup unique pages with the shopping cart. That way when I am ready to sell over the internet I can enable/disable the links and there should be no problem. Very simple solution I completely overlooked. Thanks for all your help crew.


----------

