Web shop for personalized t-shirts - three issues to watch out for

Christoph Clermont

How to make a t-shirt business even more successful? Add value by giving shoppers many additional options for refined designs - and charge for them. Create an appealing shopping experience with automated 2D mockups. And sell your products through market places such as Amazon by using a solution that can handle external data for printing.

Personalized t-shirts - apparently that´s a fiercely contested market. You will easily find dozens, even hundreds of web shops where customers can select a funny motive, add a name, order and they´re done. That is not exactly a great experience and misses out on a lot of opportunities to make a t-shirt business stand out and charge more for a product.

These are some of the options that will add value to a t-shirt:

• Give shoppers the possibility to choose between printed areas of different sizes.

• Let customers select well designed ready-made elements such as stickers, drawings or symbols.

• Make all these design elements individually editable through the user.

• Provide text options with typographic effects including bending, outlines, shadow effects.

• Offer the ability to use different designs for different areas of the shirts, such as right sleeve, left sleeve, front and back, or even individualized labels on the inside.

• Earn more by charging a small extra fee for any additional design option.

To achieve all this, you will obviously need a solution for design, publishing and configuration that is up to the task. Many vendors use dedicated software that was especially developed for t-shirt production. This will certainly do the trick when you only sell t-shirts. But once you plan to extend your product range it will put you in a tight spot. Instead, using a solution that is ready for multiple products comes with a clear advantage. All designs and documents only have to be created once. The same sticker, symbol or image frame can not only be used for a t-shirt but also for any other product. This means reduced time-to-market and of course way less design cost.

Mockups matter, but choose the right ones

Photo realistic product images with a high-quality background are essential for an appealing shopping experience. And that is especially true for t-shirts, as pretty much any fashion store shows their products on a model instead of a simple white background. For personalized t-shirts you will have to combine background photos, t-shirt designs and the ability for the shopper to configure the entire composition.

Basically, there are two ways to achieve this: Using automated 2D photo montages or 3D designs. 3D designs are great and have become increasingly popular but also come with a few downsides. They are expensive to create. In addition, they are usually harder to use, tend to get stuck more often and thus hamper the customer experience. We all know what an impatient customer means in e-commerce. To reduce unfinished purchases using 2D montages means playing it safe, while the design quality is usually the same.

Make sure you´re ready for multi-channel sales

For vendors there´s clear value in offering products not only through their own shop but also on additional market places such as Amazon, Etsy or eBay. Recent surveys have found that e-commerce shops that sell on one additional market place increase their sales by 38% on average. The number increases to 120% if a second market place is added and to 190% with a third.

This certainly looks like an appealing opportunity for a t-shirt business. But selling personalized products on market places will present a special challenge. At Amazon, for example, users will personalize their products with Amazon´s own personalization tools. After the purchase all you will receive is data for printing. Here´s the catch: many of the commonly used tools for selling personalized products can´t print from data! To benefit from selling through Amazon you should look for a solution that does the following: Receive data from multiple external sources through an API and automatically generate a PDF document for printing. Ideally this system will also let you use the same templates for your own shop and orders through Amazon. Unsurprisingly, Printess is among the solutions that will exactly do that.

Learn more, get in touch Find out more about Printess - your solution for design, publishing, configuration and production of personalized gifts. Call us at +49 337 66 469 886, send an e-mail, or register for our free trial right away.

Samples included: The sample templates you find on this page are also part of the Printess license. You may use them as a simple basis to develop your own products, or as an inspiration for your designers.