How Do Web Stores Work?
Selling clothing online has never been easier!
Opening a web store through J.Carroll takes all the headaches of selling clothing out of your hands - from designing and ordering, to collecting money and distributing. Everything runs right through the site that you're on right now, powered by the world-renowned Shopify platform. Whether you are a school, business, organization, or event, let the team at J.Carroll take care of the hard work for you, and enjoy a little bit of free time!
Here’s what we can do for you:
- Design your new apparel from scratch... we’ll bring your ideas to life!
- Get wholesale pricing on apparel... no need to hunt for the best prices
- Take orders online, allowing people to pay on their own terms and on their own time
- Pack and ship each individual order... it never needs to touch your hands
We have two different types of web stores available - pre-order stores, and continuous stores. Both are set up to make your selling experience as hands-free as possible (though you are going to have to help us out just a little bit to get the store moving). Hang out with us for a bit, let’s go through how each store works!
Pre-Order Store...
You might have heard of a pre-order or pre-sale before - concert tickets, videogames, the new iPhone. We do the same thing (on a smaller scale) here at J.Carroll! The pre-order web store is our most popular type of store that we offer. Here's how it works...
First, we’ll chat with you to figure out what you’re looking for in apparel, design, and when the store will be open. We’ll help you pick out apparel, design your gear, make some super sweet mockups, and get them up on our website - under a store name that is unique to you! Once we do that, we’ll work out pricing with you. This is where we need a little bit of your help - we need you to guesstimate how many orders you’re going to get over the course of the store so that we can get the best price per garment for you. Once you sign off on the apparel, pricing, and the storefront, we can OPEN!
Then, we collect the money from the orders, change our names, jump in our Gulfstream and head straight to Cabo.
Just kidding! Once your store opens, it needs to be monitored. While you go about your daily business, we make sure there’s no hidden issues with products, monitor how sales are doing, and make sure our vendors have good stock levels on the garments we picked out. If we notice sales are slacking, we’ll reach out to you so you can drum up some more business. Alternatively, if we notice sales are flying in, we’ll let you know how great your store is doing!
Eventually, it’s closing time (queue that Semisonic song). We’ll wrap up the store, take down the products, and update the site description letting folks know the game plan from there. We then order the garments, produce all of the apparel, and pack it individually by order. From there, we’ll do one of two things: ship it out directly to the customers or leave it for pickup in our showroom here in SLO - the customer picks their preference at checkout. There's also the option to pass the packed orders off to you to pass out by your own means - but most people prefer to let us take care of distribution.
Going back to the topic of pricing, we can suggest sell prices, but we leave it all up to you! Of course, we recommend selling at least for cost - so you can break even on your store. We work all of the costs of setting up a store into the cost of a garment, so you do not pay anything out of pocket initially. In fact, the only way you’ll ever end up owing us money, is if your store doesn’t meet the price break you picked out and you sold items for cost. You also have the ability to sell items for a profit through our stores - you can set each product to whatever price you want! At the end of the pre-order, we’ll work out how much profit you made, and either cut you a check or add it as a credit to a future order through us.
Continuous Store...
Our second option for a web store is a continuous store. The setup and look of the store is exactly the same, as well as the functionality. What’s different about this store is it never closes. Some businesses and schools like to use this option to sell uniforms, as well as another outlet to just sell their swag. Why go with a continuous web store instead of selling on your own? Well, we still take care of all of the dirty work for you - setup, money, shipping, etc. On top of that, it'll cost you far less out of pocket to operate - you don’t need to buy a large quantity of shirts up front, meaning you won’t be left with extras if you can’t sell them all!
There are a few differences between a pre-order and continuous store. First is the printing processes available - we can’t offer screen printing, since most orders are one-off orders. We can still do embroidery, heat seal, and direct-to-garment products, though. Second, is pricing - since almost everything is a one-off order, the price per garment is higher. And lastly, we do require an out-of-pocket setup fee, plus a monthly maintenance fee. This maintenance fee covers not only hosting the store online, but monitoring garment availability, any changes you might want to make over time, and monthly traffic and sales reports. When you open a continuous store with us, we work together to ensure the stores success. The only work we encourage you to do is advertise the store so you get your moneys worth!
Yeah, we know. That’s a lot to take in...
We totally understand - we try to be as upfront and transparent as possible with our web sales - meaning we need to explain everything in great detail, so you know what you’re getting into. Great thing is, you’re not getting into too much at all! Many people think opening a web store with us is going to be a daunting task. IT’S NOT! The whole goal is for you to be mostly hands-off once the store opens up - set it, and forget it (we won’t though).
If this sounds like something you might be interested in, or just want to learn some more, email us below to get started with our team!