5 Ways to Kickstart A Stalled T-Shirt Store
Okay, you’ve finally got around to creating an online store and putting some products on it. However, they’re not selling… or you’re not selling the quantity you’d hoped. Most people that want to sell t-shirts want to put a few shirts online and magically become wildly rich. When that doesn’t happen, they decide that t-shirts are a waste of time and they give up.
Don’t be one of those people!!! Many people just like you are making thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousand dollars a year selling graphic apparel online. There is no mystery in how to make this work. Here’s what you need to do:
Promote Your Products
If you are an influencer (i.e. have a large social media following) you need to be posting images of your products. Ideally in natural ways. Images of yourself or others wearing your products. The posts should ideally be shoppable. And, you need to do this regularly. If you’re trying to build a brand, you should be consistently creating brand awareness.
Think about creating a very simple marketing plan:
- Who is my demographic?
- What are they interested in?
- What’s the best way to present relevant products to them?
- Are there any partners that could help me promote?
Have the Right Products
Match your customers/fans’ passion to your products. Make some of them current event based.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Let’s say your customers are passionate about Pugs. Do a Google search for Pug T Shirt and you’ll see lots of ideas for t-shirts that you could put on your site. Now, add some current event based stuff. For example, “Pug Mom for Trump – 2020”. How about “Pugs for Keto”? Maybe those shirts will sell, maybe they won’t. But, the important thing is that you’ll be tying your site to current trends. Not sure what the top trends are/were? Check this out: https://trends.google.com/trends/yis/2018/US/
Have Enough Products
There are two ways to sell lots of t-shirts. The first is to have very hot selling, current event based products. The second is to have lots of decent products. I personally prefer a combination of the two. If my hot seller ideas don’t pan out, at least I can fall back on the fact that I have lots of products for sale. If you have a huge fan base and they’re passionate about your products, you don’t need as many. But if you don’t, you’d do well to have hundreds of products on your site – at minimum.
Advertise!
Google is the best (lowest cost and most effective) form of advertising. But it’s not for the faint of heart. Google has made it very difficult for new sellers to get approved on their Shopping Ads platform. Fortunately for you, Graphic Tee Coach has been successful in getting new accounts approved for our clients lately… so let us know if you need help with that!
Give It Some Time
Even our best sellers sometimes take 3-6 months to get selling. And, some of those sellers go on to sell thousands of shirts per year. Tips 1 through 4 combined with tip 5 will result in sales. Just don’t give up!
