A complete guide to starting your fashion e-commerce empire

Are you a fashion enthusiast? do you crave fashion? Is fashion in your DNA?

Maybe you have been looking for a way to go into full time fashion business without breaking the bank. Now it doesn’t matter if you are a student, with no business experience, or a stay-at-home mom, or a single mom or even an employee, you can go into the fashion business right away and I’m here to guide you.

The most important ingredients you need for this business to thrive are passion, and consistency, then a little below $100 to set it up even from the comfort of your home.

If you don’t have below $100 to invest in this business, kindly don’t bother to read along, or you can read along and when you have the money, theb you can start right away.  I don’t think below $100 is too much to invest in order to actualize your passion.

As a Fashion enthusiast, there are so many ways to make money from the fashion Industry, and even if you don’t want to have your own fashion brand and make your own clothings, you can join the fashion distribution and sell for established brands while making profits along the way. That is what makes you a Fashion Entrepreneur, you maximise your profits.

In this post, we will discuss how anyone with the passion even without prior experience can build a massive online Fashion portfolio and become a well established Fashion Brand.

Like i said earlier, you must not be making your own clothings, but you can be a sales force and you are going to achieve this through digital marketing armed with a website, a blog or an E-commerce website,  then offcourse the social media channels which is free.

The only money you have to spend upfront is the money to purchase your domain and hosting which will cost you below $100.

If this sounds like amazing, continue reading.

Our posts are always straight to the point so you don’t have to waste your time reading but spend your time doing.

HOW TO GET STARTED ON YOUR FASHION ENTERPRISE.

The very first thing to do is to build and design your website and this is absolutely easy even if you are not a Techy person, you can design your website and e-commerce stores with just few simple clicks from your home.

First thing is to purchase your domain name which is your unique virtual address, anyone with an internet access can access you with this domain name anytime anywhere.
Your domain name will look like this
“www.yourfashionname.com”

It is your job to choose any domain name you wish, just try to keep it memorable and short.

To purchase your domain name, simply go to Namecheap and search the domain name you wish, check for it’s availability and then purchase it. A domain name will cost you below $10 per year.

But first you will have to create an account with namecheap before you can purchase the domain name.You will require an active email to create an account with Namecheap and on this email they will send your purchase details.

Once your domain name is purchased, you can now purchase your hosting from Namecheap as well. Hosting is a virtual server that will serve and host your website, it’s a form of a virtual storage system just like the Hard drive on your computer, on this virtual server you store files, information relating to your website and Business so that anyone with an internet connection can access these files.

A hosting on Namecheap will cost below $60 per year. This is not expensive at all for any one with the passion to build a business. Building a business in this digital age is even easier and cheaper as the  internet is changing the way we do business.

Companies like Uber does not own a single car, Etsy does not own any single product, AirBnB does not have any single rental property, Amazon does not have a product as well as Alibaba.

What these companies has in common is that they built a digital portfolio on the web which is their primary source of reaching their audience.

With online shoppers being on a monumental rise, many shoppers are comfortably shopping from the comfort of thier homes due to the effect of the covid-19 pandermic, now is definitely the best time to join the trend.

Your hosting and domain name are the basic investment you will make for this fashion business to kick start, both will cost you below $100 and you have already done that, weldone.

Now is time to install the Content Management System (CMS) and i will advice you to go for WordPress and you can install WordPress with a few clicks very easy and seamless.

WordPress allows you to manage your contents, your blog posts, your product listings and so on. Once you install WordPress, you will be taken to your dashboard from where you can take charge of the way your website looks like.

Your website is your digital real estate, or  your digital footprint, you will have to make it stand out by choosing a good theme from the vast catalogue of WordPress themes.

There are a whole lot of Fashion themes which you can choose from. That’s why i recommend WordPress as a CMS because it’s such an easy platform to create with. Also, WordPress is the largest Content Management System on the web with 40% of the web managed on WordPress, and it is absolutely free.

Do you want to start with fashion blog? where you share fashion related news and information or you wish to sell fashion apparels and clothings as an Ecommerce website, WordPress is the very best way to go at it.

I will advice you go with both to harness the full potential of your digital empire. What this mean is that your website will have both a blog and an online store. WordPress is such a powerful resource you can’t afford to miss.

Everything you wish to achieve with your website can be achieved simply by installing a plug-in for that function from your WordPress dashboard.

Now Plug-ins are used to add functionality to your website, it means that any particular function you want your website to perform, a particular plug-in does that function and WordPress has more than 60 thousand plug-ins both free and premuim versions.

If you wish your website to sell your products and receive payments from anywhere in the world even while you are sleeping, the woocommerce plug-in can be used to achieve that with a few simple clicks.

With a professional WordPress website, your reach becomes unlimited, anyone with an internet access can gain access to your website, read the information you posted on your blog and even purchase the product on your online store.

The problem with brick and mortar store is that the reach is limited to your very immediate location, i.e. only those living within your immediate address will be able to access your business and this is expensive too as you have to pay for the outlet as well have physical stock.

But the website model of fashion business does not require you have a physical address, you can add your home address to your website just for address sake, but with a website your reach becomes unlimited and you don’t need to have physical stock as well. We have not even spent upto $100 so far and our website is up and running already.

We have set up our website, now is for us to begin to create contents and products for our digital fashion empire.

HOW TO MARKET OUR FASHION ONLINE BUSINESS TO DRIVE MASSIVE SALES

The best form of digital marketing is Content creation and Contents can be inform of blog posts, video tutorials.

Creating blog posts about the fashion industry is very simple, you can share fashion tips, fashion fails to avoid and fashion ideas in general, that’s all about blog post. As long as you are passionate about fashion, you will never run out of ideas to promote your fashion business.
This is a form of digital marketing called content marketing.

The more content you create about the fashion industry, the more you establish yourself as an authority in the industry and if you are consistent with your contents, you will soon build an audience around your blog and thus your Fashion Brand.

Having an audience allows you to sell anything to them. Since your audience drive value from your contents, they will also see your products as valuable as well.

Another form of Marketing Strategy is called Affiliate Marketing. Now you must not have your own product to start selling on your website, you can promote some Fashion Brands that are already established to your audience for a commission on each sale made through your website, this is called Affiliate Marketing.

Make sure you only promote brands that you use yourself and trust so that you don’t mislead your audience.

There are a whole lot of Fashion affiliate companies to join to begin making sales commission.

Yet another digital marketing strategy is Dropshipping. You can as well do dropshipping with your fashion website.

Dropshipping is where you promote fashion apparels from independent Fashion Brands, you list these clothings on your website and set your own price, once your customer makes a purchase from your website, you then contact your partner and they will ship the product to the customer directly. This is called drop shipping and it’s making millionaires every year.

As you can see the most important aspect of the Fashion Business is your Marketing Strategy and with a website you can try out different Marketing strategies to see which works for you.

The best form of digital Marketing Strategy for your Fashion business, and perhaps the least expensive is Pinterest Marketing.

This involves creating Pinterest Business account which is super easy to create and absolutely free.

Pinterest is a virtual search engine where users can create, share and save ideas in form of pins. Pinterest allows creators to attach a link to each of thier pins. This is the most important feature of Pinterest because the link attached to this pins will be live forever and anyone who clicks on the link will be taken directly to your website.

Pinterest also allows you to link your website to your Pinterest Business Account so that your posts on your website will be automatically shared on Pinterest.

The Fashion business thrives on Pinterest, so as long as you are done with the above set up, you are on your way to a massive impact and reach.

You can as well create a youtube channel and share short fashion tutorial videos. Anyone with a gmail account can create a youtube channel with few minutes.

Just like youtube channel, you must also establish a presence across social media platforms to maximize your reach. As long as you are creating valuable contents, i assure you that your audience are waiting on these platforms.

Create a facebook page, Instagram Page, Linkedin etc, create a business account on these social media platforms. Now these social media channels allow you to link your website to each and everyone of them.

Infact these social media channel actually gives preference to pages or accounts linked to a website. By now you can see the potential of a website. Linking your website to your various social media channels helps your brand to be in harmony accross all platforms. This is called Social Media Marketing Strategy.

At this stage your fashion empire is up and running and on the path to massive success. But i must tell you CONSISTENCY is the key.

As far as any success story in any industry is concerned, CONSISTENCY remains the key to any form of success.
You have to be consistent with your blog posts, product sharing accross platforms. The more you share your business, the more exposure it will receive.

There are other forms of digital Marketing strategies to try out like paid Ads across all these social media platform where you already have a business page. If you have the resources you can run some paid Ads across social media platforms and Google to give your business extra boost.

If you have any questions and need for direction to establish your Fashion Brand, kindly reach us through the chatbox on the website.

Thanks for reading.

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