With the coronavirus pandemic taking hold of the entire world, more and more people have turned to online shopping to make purchases that they would normally make at brick-and-mortar stores.

As a result, eCommerce and online shopping have seen a big rise over the past year with billions of dollars in online sales.

These figures are only set to grow in the future as more and more consumers become tech-savvy and lean towards easier, more convenient shopping that sees their product delivered to their doorstep in a matter of days and even hours.

If you’re a budding entrepreneur, you may have considered taking the online route with your business idea, one such being expanding into the T-shirt trade.

Everybody loves T-shirts.

They can make a statement, get a conversation going, and express one’s individuality in incredibly creative ways.

In this post, we’ve prepared ten factors for you to consider as you embark on your online T-shirt business.

These factors will help guide you to the most appropriate course of action, and while some may seem overwhelming at first, you’ll soon realize that entering the T-shirt trade is a profitable venture, one which you won’t look back on.

  1. Research The Market 🧐
  2. Choose A Niche Market And Find Your Target Audience ☝️
  3. Choose Your Business Model 💼
  4. Make It Legal 👨‍⚖️
  5. Determine Your Startup Costs 💰
  6. Source Your Materials 🤝
  7. Create Your Designs 👨🏾‍🎨
  8. Establish An Online Presence 🤩
  9. Get Marketing 💁🏻‍♀️
  10. Select Your Online Payment Provider 💲

Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra).

Let’s get started.

1. Research The Market 🧐

With so many products available online already, it might be hard at first to make your T-shirts stand out from the crowd, which is why you will want to begin by doing a market analysis and researching the market you’re about to enter.

A market analysis is a study of your customers, competitors, and industry and this information will help shape your business strategy, and accordingly, your T-shirt offering.

Let’s unpack the concept of a market analysis by starting with your customers. You will want to find out what their age, gender, and preferences are so that you cater your T-shirts to their needs.

Remember Economics 101 where the professors spoke about supply and demand?

Here is where this principle comes in. You’ll need to know your customers and what they want before you can supply it to them.

Secondly, take a look at your competitors in the T-shirt industry.

How many other online shops are offering T-shirts? What are the prices of these T-shirts? Where are they being sold - internationally or domestically? What designs are currently on offer and can you beat these?

Finally, you need to look at the industry as a whole. Here, you can take cognizance of its size and scope, its projected growth rates (and for T-shirts, these are relatively high), in addition to the life cycles of other businesses in this industry.

2. Choose A Niche Market And Find Your Target Audience ☝️

finding your target market

The term niche refers to "a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product ".

Finding your T-shirt business's niche is important in helping your brand stand out without spending too much money.

After all, there are thousands of online T-shirt businesses out there that yours needs to compete with in order for you to make a profit.

Remember that the more you narrow your niche, the more you narrow your potential customers. However, having a niche too broad means that your business won't get noticed.

Your niche needs to be just right. Kind of like Goldilocks's porridge.

But how do you find your niche? Here are some tips:

  • Check out the competition, their supporters, and their engagement levels
  • Use an audience insights tool to help gauge the potential of your niche
  • Consider your own passions and interests

👉Finding your niche first also makes it easier to determine your target audience.

There are a number of ways to determine your target market without having any prior customer base:

  1. Research the market and any industry trends
  2. Understand your customer lifecycle and any potential points of friction
  3. Check out your competitors and who their customers are
  4. Create a buyer persona
  5. Define who your target market definitely excludes

Remember a target market is more than just a person's demographics.

3. Choose Your Business Model 💼

different business models

Once the work mentioned above is done, you’ll want to choose your business plan and model carefully. There are several you can choose from, including the traditional DIY method.

But these days, with technological advancements, there are other business models that can really help get your T-shirt business off the ground.

👉Two of these models are dropshipping and print on demand.

Dropshipping refers to the system whereby a third party deals with the sales order, which ships the T-shirt to the customer. You’re responsible for finding the client and closing the sale, while the actual inventory doesn’t need to be managed by you.

Then there’s a print-on-demand company. Here, you work with a supplier who will sell your products under your own brand. Some of the benefits of this model include the fact that you don’t pay for the product until after you’ve sold it.

On the other hand, you’ll also want to consider how much inventory of your stock your supplier should have on hand and ready to ship.

Your ultimate cost per item will be higher than if you buy in bulk. This is why it’s important to consider which method is going to yield the best results.

4. Make It Legal 👨‍⚖️

This is a very important step that can save you a lot of time and money in the future.

Depending on where you're located you may be required to obtain a permit or license before starting your T-shirt business, such as an occupational license or resale license.

Make sure to register the name of your T-shirt business and file all the necessary paperwork.

Is your business a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a limited partnership, a limited liability company (LLC), a c-corporation, or an s-corporation?🤔

For those who don't know:

A sole proprietorship means that one person owns the business and pays taxes on income earned by the business. In a partnership, a partner owns the business but does not pay any personal tax on profits made by the business.

In a Limited Partnership (LP) a partner owns the business and pays both personal and corporate taxes. An LLC owns the business and pays corporate taxes, but not personal taxes on profits made by the company.

A c-corporation owns the business and pays personal and corporate taxes. Finally, an S-corp owns the business and pays neither personal nor corporate taxes on profits made by its owners.

👉Depending on which one of these your business is, there will be certain financial and legal implications for your business.

It's best to use multi-state registered agent services - such companies do help to choose the best business structure, as well as do all the paperwork for you.

5. Determine Your Startup Costs 💰

There is no point dreaming up this business if you cannot afford to set it up and run it for a couple of months with the potential of no profits being made.

Because chances are, until your T-shirt business makes a name for itself you will be largely in the red.

Here are some costs you need to keep in mind:

  • Your fixed costs: the cost of your eCommerce platform, any electricity, rent, and insurance costs
  • Your inventory costs: you need to be able to cover the cost of buying the actual T-shirts and remember buying in bulk is better.
  • Your printing costs: printing on T-shirts yourself or outsourcing this to a print-on-demand service. No matter the method (screen printing, heat transfer, or direct garment), printing costs money.
  • Your marketing costs: will you be doing this yourself? or hiring someone? will you be running paid ads?

You need to have the money upfront in order for your business to operate smoothly from its inception.

6. Source Your Materials 🤝

It might seem easy. All you need to start out is a T-shirt and there are so many places where you can get this.

However, if you want to stand proud in the T-shirt crowd, you need to source your materials carefully.

This means sourcing high-quality T-shirts from respected suppliers.

Not all T-shirts are the same, because not all fabrics are the same.

No one - neither you nor your customer - wants to end up in a situation of the T-shirt becoming a rag after a couple of washes, the designs fading too soon or the T-shirt ripping easily.

This is why to secure your brand reputation and image, you need to source high-quality materials.

This is where research will come into play as you’ll need to consider things like thread count, the material of the T-shirt (cotton etc.), whether it will be a crew or V-neck, long or short-sleeved, and a combination of other factors.

7. Create Your Designs 👨🏾‍🎨

Now is the time to put your creativity in motion! You need to develop a product (in this case a T-shirt) first before you can start selling.

Yes of course you need business skills to start your successful online T-shirt business but you also need to somehow come up with simple and complex designs.

You’ve wanted to open up a T-shirt business, so you need to offer your customers something really special.

This is where your design skills will come in handy, but fear not.

If you’re not the creative type, you can always outsource your T-shirt design to a professional graphic designer.

However, with the number of easy-to-use design tools available on the market such as Linearity Curve (it's free!), Adobe, Procreate and CorelDRAW we doubt you'll be needing to hire someone.

Although handing off work to someone else can make your life a lot easier.

Remember to test out your designs and T-shirt mockups and protypes on an audience.

Reddit is a perfect platform where you can gauge your audience’s opinions, see what works, what doesn’t, and what is absolutely loved.

If after all of that you are still stuck on design ideas, you can actually buy some online T-shirt designs. But remember, there is a high chance of these designs already being out there in the market.

Original designs are your best bet for making your online T-shirt business stand out.

8. Establish An Online Presence 🤩

It goes without saying that you need to have an online presence for your online T-shirt business.

Firstly, you will need to create a website and online shop to help you attract your clients and draw them in to close the sale. Having a website that is designed well, on-trend, and still functional with great user experience is key.

A variety of eCommerce tools, such as Weebly, Shopify, and Squarespace, will make this step as easy as one, two, three.

A website is a place to fully showcase your T-shirt designs and add value to your customers at the same time.

How might you add value? 🤷‍♂️

This can be done by creating a blog, offering a newsletter, creating an email list so that you can send your customers informed about new deals and sales, and ultimately to market your product better.

A pro tip: why not have website functionality that allows your customers to create custom T-shirts? Custom T-shirts are a fun way to engage your customers and improve the user experience without you having to do any hard work.

9. Get Marketing 💁🏻‍♀️

Once you’ve conducted your market analysis and identified your customers and target demographic, you’ll need to know where to find them.

But how can you find your customers and increase your brand awareness? It takes some marketing to do so.

This is where you’ll want to invest in digital marketing and in particular, social media marketing, create a great website and online shop and you’ll also want to look at recruiting the services of influencers.

How can this help you find your audience? 👀

It’s quite simple. Social media marketing allows you to target your customer base, on any social media platform, by a variety of factors. These range from age, gender, interests, hobbies, and others.

With correct targeting and ad positioning, you’ll be able to draw your customers into your online T-shirt store, leading them to a great landing page, where you can also offer them useful information before they make a purchase.

Email marketing is also a technique that shouldn't be overlooked when creating your marketing plan. Email marketing can help turn users into loyal customers.

If you have the marketing budget, we suggest trying out influencer marketing.

People will be more likely to buy your designs if they see that other people that they admire (or aspire to be) are wearing them.

Having a killer marketing strategy and using all the best marketing tools is often the key to the success of your online business.

Remember that the more value you add to your customer, the more likely they are to buy from you.

Also consider implementing a Reviews section for your website, as this is what is considered today “word-of-mouth” advertising - one of the best ways to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

10. Select Your Online Payment Provider 💲

For the final step, you’ll want to select your online payment provider carefully.

Remember that you’ll want to take advantage of instant settlement of funds and integrate your online T-shirt store with some of the world’s most popular e-commerce sites.

You can also use something like this T-shirt order form that allows you to collect payments and sell your T-shirt online through your website.

Easy-peasy🙌

Other factors to look out for include selecting a provider which offers you a free merchant account with IBAN, no monthly or annual fees, and all this while accepting a wide range of online payment solutions.

Keeping in mind that your customers may be local as well as international, you’ll want to cater to as many different financial needs and currencies as possible.

That’s a Wrap! 👏🏼

As a budding online T-shirt store owner, we hope we’ve helped you understand some of the intricacies that go into opening your online store.

While the task may seem daunting at first, with careful research and baby steps, you can easily commence on your entrepreneurial journey and never look back.

From researching your market, finding your audience and ideal customer profile, and choosing the right business model to a few other steps in between, you can rest assured that your bases are covered when it comes to starting your online T-shirt store in 2023.

As a final thought, remember that online shopping is big and that it is here to stay so any ventures into an online side hustle or the eCommerce business world could be profitable for you.