Running an Online Fashion Boutique

If you are in fashion business you may want to think about running an online store, as part of the business. Online shopping is going to be the future of sales and marketing. Maintaining an online store is a very popular and a successful way of effective marketing and sales. Even if you don’t have a physical store, you can still run your business through an online sales portal. Starting and running an online fashion store is quite cheaper and manageable than running a traditional boutique store. However, there are few things that you need to learn and follow if you are to succeed with online marketing and sales.

Starting An Online Fashion Clothing Store

The very first thing and perhaps the most important thing about running an online clothing store are to get a proper web application that will act as your online store. This website should not only be attractive to do the proper marketing itself, but also should be technically sophisticated to enable online ordering, purchasing and delivery with proper internet security mechanisms. You may need to hire a professional to do this for you. To get a feeling about online fashion stores, visit the following popular fashion stores:

• Mark & Spencer
• Karen Millen
• Calvin Klein

Online businesses cater for convenient marketing as well. Depending on your target market, you can use social networking, email and online surveys to reach your customers and promote your business. In present day, use of social marketing is extremely important for the success of an online business.

You also need a merchant account that accepts credit card payments. For more flexibility, you may need to support all recognized types of cards; master card, visa, Amex, PayPal etc… major part of the setup will involve completing your online inventory. You may want to have attractive pictures of the inventory items on the website. Also, it’s very important to stick to international standards of sizes when you display information on your clothes and other garments. This is very important if you are in to international sales. Your clients do not have the flexibility to actually try them out before they purchase, so there should 100% accurate information on sizes and scales.

If everything is in place, before you launch your online shopping portal, do troubleshoot on the application to see everything is working as you expect.

Running a Successful Online Fashion Store

Once you have a supplier who provides you the required garments and accessories and set up a warehouse, you might want to think about the delivery mechanism. Unlike traditional sales where the customers visit your store and physically purchase what they want, here the purchasing and selling are virtual. How your customers going to receive their purchase and how efficient the delivery process is very vital for the success of your online shopping mall. There are several ways delivery can be done. You will need to constantly update your online inventory as it reaches reorder level. Your website should be up-to-date with the latest items you add on to the inventory, any promotions and sales. You must also have a mechanism to respond to customer queries, complaints and their feedback. Customer relationship and satisfaction are very important in online business as well.