How To Start An Online Fashion Business - 6 Steps To Starting An Online Retail Website

today is Paul and this video is slightly different from my other videos if you're fed up in your job if you're wanting to start an online business or maybe your own fashion brand or fashion blog then what this is is recent footage from a presentation that I gave a trade show event in London called pure London so I've literally just got the whole footage the whole presentation that you can watch I was slightly nervous going into it but I had some really really good feedback and it's the sixth step to starting an online business so I'm going to go into that footage now hopefully you enjoy it guys if you do let me know in the comments below welcome to my presentations everything today is going to be about online retail quick show of hands who's already got an online retail store so the few experts already in the crowd who's got a physical store but they're not selling online quick show of hands and then who's complete newcomer and they've thinking about starting online good stuff so guys I'm Paul obviously and over the next half an hour I'm going to try and teach you everything that I know about online retail to sign an online retail business and start with I just want to highlight a few of the advantages of online retail now you guys probably know a lot of these already firstly it's very low cost you can start an online research store today on a very low budget in comparison to start in a store where you have to obviously pay for rent you have to pay for fits in furniture it's very very low cost which then also makes it very low risk you can start on and restart this store today and you can put a little risk into it and if it doesn't pay off you want to lose a lot of money in the process 24/7 sells I'm going to explain my story in just a minute but when I had a sale from Kazakhstan at 3 o'clock in the morning when I was asleep I knew that online retail was what I wanted to do morale so you can make 24/7 sales worldwide you have a much wider audience its mobile mobile it's more trusted now I've seen a lot of mobile phones in the audience already you can buy on your mobile who's bought something from Amazon on mo how quick are Amazon when you buy something they take your money without even entering your credit card information anymore so online retail is mobile and that's going to be more accessible for you guys as well it's more trusted it's growing every single year online retail is growing and it's very very easy to start for my quick story I started an online fashion business seven years ago so I started when I was 19 years old and I was very naive I made a lot of mistakes at the same time I'd have few successes as well and this sounds a bit cheesy but my fashion business did really changed my career and it changed my life it gave me freedom it allows me to work wherever I want and I can still generate an income doing so I run an online business full time from home if I decide to travel I can still run my business if I'm in a coffee shop today I can still run my business okay so online retail and working online is the fashion business has helped me massively a few little shots has me featured on vogue I'm GQ these were around LCM which happened a few years ago that's me of my son Teddy who is now 7 months old and one of the biggest advances for me working online is I get to spend a lot of time with him yeah I'm always there and I get to see him grow up a side men's fashion magazine calm about four years ago and that is what I still do today and there's me littering at you al London College of Fashion short courses where I teach online retail over a two-day course I just want to quickly mention this everyone here has probably got a turning point a reason why they wanted to start a business a reason why they wanted to go online I said I started this when I was 19 the reason why I started this when I was 19 it's because out of the blue is my dad I lost my dad completely out of the blue I was working in a office on a call center doing IT help and this has been and it kind of kicked me up the backside for go and do so in my life so I left my job took a huge risk came here seven years ago when I first started an online retail store and I have never looked back since and as where is it kind of gives you that bit of clarity because anyone can kind of have a turning point and make fun of life enough of the motivational speaker now so let's get to the content the first problem that most people say when it comes to online retailers it's too expensive who here thinks that online retail is expensive to set up is there one thing that few people who thinks it costs more than a thousand pounds to get a website design that you can make sales from so with online retail I started men's fashion magazine calm on a hundred pounds okay and it took me less than two weeks to make my money back online retail create an online fashion business isn't expensive here's a little breakdown you can don't get a domain name for five pounds um go Daddy on Blue Hose trying to follow water Go Daddy Blue Hose you can get a domain names from five pounds that is your brand calm you can get hosting for thirty pounds a year WordPress Shopify these are two things I'm going to mention in today's presentation they are free you don't have to pay for them again it makes it so easy for you guys nowadays a theme is a template that you can have again you don't need to pay for a theme you can get free themes by paid 40 pounds to the theme that I use the men's fashion magazine com I take 20 pounds for an additional help and I paid five pound for a logo obviously you may pay more than that for those breakdowns it is very very inexpensive in other words you can set up a website today for a very very small budget the second problem is people say that it's too technical now there's no better time than now with the resources available seven years ago when I started it wasn't as easy as it is for you guys now put your hands up if you've heard of Shopify that's good to hear the answer what if you had a WordPress again that's good to hear so when I started I had to build I have to learn how to code I have to learn how to create something from scratch I had to pay money for someone to do it with nowadays you guys can sign up to a free trial to Shopify for 14 days you haven't got a penny spent play around with it did you can serve your online store and it really isn't as difficult as you think so there's more resources than you can imagine if you can create a blog or a website through WordPress or Shopify setting up your own e-commerce store you can create graphics on canva.com again you don't have to be a graphic designer you don't have to have Photoshop canva comm is a solution for that and also you can create something to sell for low to no cost drop shipping is very very big as well today and there's some amazing brands obviously here today that you can sell online very very easily the next problem is people finger you need experience or you need a lot of time you do not need experience in the industry to be able to create a sustainable business a lot of my students that come a London College of Fashion as a short course don't have any previous experience a lot of them just want to set up a business to make a site income so you do not need any experience and most importantly you don't need as much time as people think the reason why you don't need a lot of time is because you can outsource for very very low cost online so their sites light up work Elance freelance and websites where you can outsource overseas so for example I fit with team up over the last seven years and I've never met any of them the reason is because they're all in different countries and you do that through up work if I if I have a developer something goes wrong with my magazine I Skype him we talk he fixes it through a lot of the low cost considering if I had an office in London does that make sense yeah so up work is the one that I use interns is another great way to free up your time so you can spend time doing the things that you're good at you also have automated systems online as well I scheduled up all of my social media for my social media goes out without me actually physically doing it because I spend Monday morning scheduling up all my updates for the week and I use HootSuite calm to do that is tea tea tea is another source that you can use to schedule up everything things can be automated when you work online if you're in a physical location you can automate a lot of those systems but when you're working online you can automate a lot of it to save your time there are more bloggers and more brands sharing their voice online of a lot of you have probably seen the success stories through Instagram through online marketing through online retail and again there are a lot of bloggers we're going to be doing a blogger panel after they're now sharing their voice through the form of online media and you really don't need to be involved in the industry so guys literally I've got half an hour to show you what I teach people in two days and two days still is it long enough to teach them what I try and teach them so I'm going to try and go through the main step of my course in terms of online retail and then hopefully we've got some time you can ask them questions and I'll stay around as well after after the talk so the first step that all you need to do is you want to think about online retail is ask yourself the question of will your idea work so I started a online retail store Brighton mancom seven years ago as my first ever online venture I sold it a few years ago and I made a lot of mistakes I always had a lot of successes and one of the biggest mistakes I had is I thought it would work I thought that everyone would enjoy my idea I thought that everyone would like the products I bought the stuff that I sold I never ever researched the market so what I thought would work at 19 wasn't very good by the way it is very it wasn't very trendy didn't work because I didn't do my research it's a great comparison this is an article by Bloomberg the headline is how Daniel Wellington made a $200 million business out of cheap watches who's heard of Daniel Wellington and a lot of their success was through Instagram through social media marketing the other headline from fold is why do so many fledging fashion businesses fail and my point on this is if you do not do your research you do not know how well you're going to do the other thing with online marketing is you do not need to stand outside with a clipboard on Oxford Circus High Street asking people questions that isn't research when you work online you have tools like SEM rush Google Keyword planner which is now called Adwords you have Facebook audience insights that breaks down an audience the demographics and tells you what people want and you can simply just provide it to them the second step is figuring out how you're going to make money from your online store the first obvious way is selling physical products you're obviously all here today thinking and selling physical products buying people with products in creating your own products and selling them on a store that is obviously the first way that you can make money through online retail you can also sell someone else's products through drop shipping who's heard of drop shipping the answer the drop shipping is you are simply playing the middleman or the middle woman so you are literally playing you're in the middle you list it on your website as your product as soon as someone buys it you order it from the drop ship so the drop shipper sends it to the customer so you are simply having no risk there because you're not investing any money up front for me personally I love number one I love selling physical products because I like being in control of the return on investment you can also sell digital products and advertising which is what I do through the magazine MSM step three is a technical stuff and I haven't got a lot of time to show you the technical stuff but you can literally do this in 15 minutes and I'm not lying when I say that I've shown this a student I've shown this to my 50 year old mum and she's been able to set up a website as well now this is how you do it I'm going to go through this very quickly but there is some free training that I'll show you see you guys as well the first step is you register your domain name so that is your dot-com and you have to have hosting I recommend you do it through Bluehost comm you can do both of it all in one go so it saves you time you have GoDaddy you have one two three Reds you have other places but Bluehost go there register your domain name and register your hosting hosting is something you have to pay monthly or yearly the more visits that you get the more you pay keep at the beginning pay very very little then you install WordPress or Shopify those are the two solutions I advise for you in terms of e-commerce in terms of online retail I would sway more toward Shopify than WordPress ok WordPress you can sell your own products there's something called WooCommerce but Shopify is a little bit easier in terms of online retail that is free and Shopify like I said you can pay a monthly fee but you have a free trial once you've installed that you find a theme and you add the theme developers designers coders create these templates for you to download so they've done all the hard work for you they're all mobile optimized they look good on mobile they take payments all of the hard works been done you haven't got to pay thousands for a design now the question everyone always system is isn't that just taken someone else's idea is that my website gonna look like everyone else's website but you can customize it yourself your specification you change the images you move things around you change the font you make it look very very different we haven't got time to do it now but if you looked at NetSupport a if you look to a source if you look to fire fetch if you look to Topshop for example they all have very similar anyway okay it's a very simple theme that everyone follows and you can do this with Shopify so like I said if you head over to YouTube you can search for how to make a blog and I've got a video on there that walks you through over shoulder so it shows me doing it in 15 minutes so in 15 minutes I registered the main name set on my hosting installed Shopify I've installed WordPress sorry find a theme and write a post all in 15 minutes so it isn't difficult and you can follow along and there are other videos on YouTube guys I'm not being biased but what's mine this is a little bigger step four is content is king this is so important as an online retail store the only time you update your website is when you have a new product or you have a sell or you have a banner or something like that Google to the consumer as well they love fresh content you cannot just wait until you have a new product line six months later to update your website all of you is online retail stores need to have content you need to get in the blogger mindset as well whether you do that yourself or you pay someone to do it for you or you get an intern for example you need to have content is anyone here got a blog see your hands up now the reason why I say content is King is because we as consumers don't like being sold to any more we do not like being sold to we have to have trust before we buy something if you came up to me and said go and buy something from my store I'm not going to do it if you came up to me and gave me some value you gave me some advice you gave me a free blog post you gave me a free video I'm more likely to trust your brand and buy into your story and then buy your product there's a guide I follow called Gary Vaynerchuk and he's got a concept called Jab Jab Jab right hook and there's anyone read that book dr. Debra hook and the idea behind that is the jab jab jab is the content content content you're givin away free value and then the right hook is the ask for the cell you cannot just ask for the sell straightaway and the reason you do that is through content if your content needs to be shareable you need to be very consistent with your content every week twice a week three times a week twice a month however you want to do it you just need to make sure that you're consistent with it you need to connect with your audience when you do it know who your avatar is know who you're talking to and blogs to that person gives before you get these values give them how-to videos ways to where your products why they're going to benefit from your product give other people the exposure rather than just talking about yourself all the time let's post and how-to content performs very well so if you're a brief if you sell bracelets how-to about how you can wear it how you can accessorize it what you can wear your bracelet web on a Friday night there are so much content that you can create around one specific product and contact most importantly would attract visitors you'll get visitors through social media you'll get businesses through Google once you have content on your online store if any of you have an online retail store and you don't have content you're missing out a huge opportunity because you're just trying to sell trying to sell trying to sell it can work but you have to be a lot more aggressive than if you're giving value through content on your online store step five is the easy transaction how do you actually make money again it's so simple PayPal is something that a lot of people use nowadays stripe is another great example and Shopify and WooCommerce WordPress have these all built in so if you want to start taking payments on a Shopify you simply just link up stripes to Shopify it walks you through it step by step and then the money will come in to your stripe account every week stripe will release it into your bank account it's as simple as that there is no confusing process when it comes to making money online behind up if you've bought something online as well yeah nearly the whole room everyone trusts buying stuff online now so do not worry about maybe not making as much money as you what if you're physically transacting just going back to that slide as well quickly guys honestly I mention Amazon have the one-click checkout where they will store your details and then they will specially take your money as soon as you set by that is going to be more readily available to you guys as well as startups as smaller brands when service I start to integrate it and they are already doing it it's going to be more accessible for people to simply walk to a store this their favorite store and buy on their phones through one-click checkout today suddenly you want to keep in mind because that is going to enhance the amount of sales you make step six is create exposure this is the most important thing everyone knows that marketing is the most important thing this is probably one of the biggest mistakes that I made first off I invested a lot of time a lot of resources into the product into the website I launched it and I thought that because it was online everyone would come flood in and see my website it didn't work like that I had to do marketing so when I launched Brighton mancom seven years ago I've put it live i sat back I thought I'd be a millionaire and it didn't happen I'm the only person who visited it was my mom my brother and my best friend and that's what it is same for about a week so I need you to do some marketing to get some visitors one of the ways you can do that social media you can build a Facebook page a YouTube channel on Instagram profile start building up your own following and most importantly you can look up your competitors and look at their follow in as well a great tip that I can give you is look at your competitors Facebook page Instagram page look at all the comments look at all the engagement see what people are saying about their brand and tailor your marketing around that search engine optimization is something else that you may want to consider which is basically ranked in your site in Google I studied that seven years ago everything I learned seven years ago is wrong okay it changes all the time so that's something that you may want to consider looking into SEO how you can rate your website for different terms online coverage getting bloggers to write about your brand doing guest posts on other blogs getting magazines to write about your brand's online these are all great ways to get more visitors to your site so for example I run an online magazine that has quite a quite a big audience the case if you're a menswear brand you could come to me and say could you do some exposure on my brand if I wrote about your brand or included your brand in one of our posts our readers are going to see that we've already established an audience you're going to siphon off some of my audience does that make sense instead of starting from scratch doing it yourself look to blogs look to bloggers to write about you and gain some visitors from them paid advertising is very very big right now who's ever run a Facebook ad campaign Facebook knows everything about you Facebook knows what you have for dinner last night how old you are who you're in a relationship with where you went to college where you are Facebook knows too much about you so as a state as an advertiser you can run ads to a specific demographic I could run an ad to a man who came to this event today who supports Liverpool Football Club who's 25 you can get so targeted with your marketing and Facebook ads is a paperclip basis so you are only pay when someone clicks on your ads and visits your website Facebook ads you have YouTube ads the really annoying ads at the beginning the videos right then you can't skip after five seconds you can run ads there as well again you get very targeted with that you can do media buying now quickly on that point everyone is scared of paid advertising because they feel like they're going to waste money for me I don't call it paid advertising I call it investment advertising if I'm investing 100 thousand pounds into a campaign and I'm returning 200 thousand pounds I'm going to keep running that campaign so don't look at it like you're going to be wasting money because if you can get a return on it then keep it running and you want complete control of that advertising and then that's not nice alright visitors people coming straight to your your website so if they remember your brand they'll come straight to your website so they want to reshot they'll go straight to your website direct visitors believe it or not is a huge traffic source so my advice to you on that point is make sure that you have the dot-com or the dot coded UK or whatever your country code is okay I started with coded you came in fashion magazines or coding UK cost me eight pounds I started to build up that website some bugger basically got the column wasn't doing any thing with it okay so after two years of starting to build a business from the dot Kota UK I approached them and said how much do you want for the dot-com and I bought it for two thousand pounds just for the dot-com okay but the reason is because I believe the dot-com is very very important when I had the dot-com we started to get more traffic we started to be exposed on other Google search engines so I always always recommend you get the dot-com and the doctor to UK but don't spend a lot upfront because some comms are going for a lot of money right now I also want to highlight this happen in two influences influences an influencer marketing is extremely important in today's market there are people who have created an Instagram following without really knowing that they've created an Instagram following okay it's Sciences shift but more people have got a lot of Instagram followers and I don't know why they've done it or they don't know how to monetize it so you can really tap into that gain such as owns here they can do a shout out for you on Instagram see they can wear your product the same with YouTube this guy here Aaron Marino he's got a YouTube channel it's a men's style youtube channel he's an American guy he's just hit 2 million subscribers six years ago he had 30,000 subscribers he was making videos in his bedroom I saw him I emailed him really love your videos can I send you some products I sent him a scarf and a watch he did a video on it and that generated me a lot of cells and a lot of traffic and he had 30,000 subscribers back then I met with Aaron last week in Atlanta he now has two million subscribers and he told his about 30,000 for a video so you can see the potential of YouTube and influencer marketing he's just done a video with Dollar Shave Club Dollar Shave Club has paid him to do a video sponsoring their product and they'll get a return on that because aaron has huge influence over his audience so you can do it of youtubers people with a social following bloggers and lookbook got nu is another great source for that for those are the six steps I'm going to recap them in a minute but this is very very important okay what potential customers truly one every sell online is built around these free fun mental trust if I don't trust your sight I'm not going to buy from you it's as simple as that if I trust you if you've given me value if I bought into your story your products and you maybe as a person if your personal branding I will buy your products because I trust you I trust that I'm going to get what I've come for if you've got a good product or service I'm always going to come back if I order things from you and you get it to me quickly and it's in wraps in a nice package in and I get it when I want it to I'm going to shop again I'm going to refer you through my five thousand Twitter followers okay I'm going to share it to three hundred thousand people on Facebook but if I order something from you and it takes two weeks to arrive and it comes in a brown envelope and there's nothing else in it apart from the product what do you think I'm going to do I'm not going to recommend you I'm not going to shop again and then last but not least get more than they give if someone buys from you you need to over-deliver okay you need to give them something they didn't expect everyone loves free stuff if someone's got free peaks are outside of Pizza Express outside everyone no one's hungry but they're still going to get the freebies because they love free stuff so you want to include that in your packaging give them free stuff personalized letters mr. Porter and net support they do that extremely well when I ordered so for mr. Porter it had mr. McGregor in the packaging it had a suit bag with my name on it I had a letter out of free gift so you want to give more than they expect that they're going to get so just to recap and then we'll do I'm a quick Q&A if we've got time number one make sure that your idea will work do your research number two decide how you want to make money for your online store number three sets up your website doesn't take any more than 15 minutes the technical stuff don't let it don't you just follow along and you'll get it done in 15 maybe not 15 minutes maybe 30 minutes an hour maybe a weekend but you can get it done a lot quicker than you expect to number four focus on content because content is king the easy transaction set up your payment processes trust the process people are transacting millions of dollars millions of pounds every every day online do not worry about that side of it and create exposure focus heavily on your marketing if your marketing sucks so is your brand you need to focus on your often if I can do guys you can too ok so simple is that I started like I said when I was 19 it took me a few years to actually start making a full-time income through an online business but do not be daunted by a lot of people to put off by online retail online marketing because they think there's too much information out there to simplify the process follow these steps and it will make it a lot easier for you guys want to reach out there's my email Paul at P McGregor com we'll also we've got a flyer I teach online resell at the London College of Fashion short courses it's about five or six a year so if you do want to come and learn a little bit more feel free to grab a flier off me or Mitchell is floating around somewhere I hope this is valuable and like I said if you have any questions guys I'll be hanging around after this and yeah thank you very much [Music] Oh

Channel: Paul McGregor

Views: 273,921

Keywords: online retail, fashion business, online fashion business, how to start a fashion business, starting a fashion business, how to start an online retail business, start an online retail website, get started in fashion, create a fashion business, create a fashion brand, start online fashion brand, business, pure london

Id: j2cbjkGv0pw

Length: 27min 38sec (1658 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2017