Adding Online Shirt Design Software To Your Decorated Apparel Website

Here are some tips on how to make the most of adding an online design software program to your Website.

One of the biggest trends in the decorated apparel industry is online custom tee shirt design. When set up correctly, it can function as a 24-hour salesperson. It’s a great way to capture the small-order market and satisfy customers who would otherwise not be profitable. I have 30 online shirt design Websites in operation, and I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to make this business model successful.

From the time an order is downloaded into the system, we can have an order processed and machine ready, if needed, within 5 minutes. Online design is a huge timesaver for any decorator. It frees up that bottleneck of waiting on the customer to make a decision and having to do edits. We actually speak to only about 1% of those customers, so there is very little interaction.

When I first started out, I bought online design software from a supplier. It is a solid product for most applications; however, it did have limitations that resulted in me having custom software developed.

For someone just getting started, you’ll want to research the online design programs that are out there. A lot of the programs are subscription based, and the fees are modest. It allows people to get into the business without a huge capital investment. Typical costs range from $1,500-$2,000 to get set up. If you choose to do the set-up yourself, some of the leading companies have monthly subscriptions as low as $49.00 per month with a fairly reasonable royalty per transaction.

I have reviewed numerous demos that companies have sent me. For the most part, you are up and running in a week. There is some legwork, or you can pay people to do the legwork if you prefer. Most of them are intuitively laid out, and it is easy to track what you are doing. Anybody can do it.

One limitation I have found with online software design packages is that they will take only certain file types such as jpeg’s, gif’s and PNG’s. For example, you can’t upload PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, or CorelDRAW files.

An important long term consideration for your business is where the actual design software resides. The ideal situation is to have the software on the server where your main URL is located. This type of arrangement will allow you to link the catalog and the designer directly to your home page for the maximum search engine optimization (SEO) possibilities. By having the catalog on your server you will grow your site as you add pages and products. If  these pages are properly optimized for Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines, this will increase the chances that you will eventually be found in organic search results. Organic search is non-paid advertising. SSEO is the key to success.

Our soon to be released custom-built system will take virtually any file type and display it onscreen for the customer to manipulate. It will handle embroidery, direct-to-garment printing, and screen printing in the traditional manner.

Getting Good Artwork

One of the biggest challenges for any decorated apparel business is getting good artwork and that problem will not go away with online design software. When graphic design programs started becoming available for free, everyone on the planet became a graphic designer. We started getting artwork in programs like Power Point and Microsoft Word, and artwork in general started to go downhill.

Artwork is an ongoing customer service issue. When a customer uploads poor artwork, first they are given an opportunity to upload better artwork. However, there are often times when we have to contact customers by phone. Our art staff is knowledgeable enough to know when artwork is bad, we will not print it. We’d rather not print an order and then get complaints from customers that they should have been contacted.

For the customer who doesn’t have any artwork, most of the online design programs come with a nice library of stock designs. The customer can pick and choose anything from sports to occupations to novelty designs, add type, choose colors, and spend as much time as they want getting a design they love.

Decorating Methods

All my online decorated apparel sites using the stock online design programs offer only digital direct-to-garment printing or embroidery. This is because these two methods lend themselves best to smaller orders. Direct-to-garment printing is the most effective way of decorating for orders placed online.

For our Web sites with the new custom software, we’re also offering screen printing but with a 36-piece minimum.

In terms of dealing with the poor artwork issues, digital direct-to-garment printing is the most logical and simplest decorating process to offer if you have online ordering capabilities. With industrial-quality digital equipment you can take .jpegs, questionable .gifs, and a whole range of formats that we would never consider for screen printing and make them useable. In my opinion, digital is the preferred medium for online ordering and all the biggest players in the online business are direct-to-garment printing operations.

Shirt Styles

You want to be selective about the brands you offer with an online ordering system. For direct-to-garment printing, all shirts do not print equally well. We know what doesn’t work, and we want to avoid those.

Also, you want to limit your product choices to something that is manageable, otherwise you overwhelm the customer. We offer about 35 styles in Custom T-shirts on the main Website (http://goblueheron.com) and that covers hundreds of colors. It’s a mix of unisex, ladies’, and kids’ styles.

We stock certain styles in black and white that we print a lot of, but otherwise our shop is in close proximity to all major distributors so we just order each day what we need to cover the incoming orders.

Customer Contact

Communication is important to the success of your online design business. No matter how sophisticated the Internet has become, you have to communicate through the Web site well enough to create a comfort level that the customer is going to be willing to give you a credit card number.

We are proactive when we see anything that is suspect in an order; we get on the phone with the customer immediately. It’s also helpful to have a good FAQ section. We try to answer as many questions as we can throughout the Website.

A good terms and conditions page also is invaluable, and I’m not talking about the one that is written by a lawyer that you can get free online. It has to be one that people can understand. Customers need to know what your policies are. If policies are posted then you are covered, but they have to be posted from your home page not buried deep in the site. If we make an error, we are very clear that we replace the product. We don’t squabble about it.

Monitoring Orders

At our shop, any questions that come in from the question button go to multiple people simultaneously. That way we monitor our email 14 hours a day. You have to have redundancy, because it is all about speed and responsiveness. When a question is answered everyone is automatically notified via Microsoft Outlook.

On weekends, we also have people who watch incoming questions, but you don’t have to do that. Most customers understand that businesses are closed on weekends.

Online Order Characteristics

We have found our average order for dark shirts runs between 24 and 72 pieces. On white custom shirts, it is less under 12 pieces. We offer a volume discount and that is incorporated into the order process. We get very few single orders. 

One of the most important lessons I learned since I got involved in online ordering is single orders should not be discounted. Sometimes a customer is running a test of your service and quality, and it could turn in an order of thousands.

In the last calendar year, we’ve had single-piece orders that turned into more than $50,000 worth of business. So you never know who that customer is and that is why you have to be nice to everybody. You never know who is going to be that big hitter.

Getting Customers

Unlike in the popular movie “Field of Dreams,” the saying “If you build it, they will come,” does NOT apply to Websites. You must educate yourself about how to drive traffic to your Website and create a plan of regular activity to ensure your investment in online design software pays off. I estimate that 90% our the activity on our Websites is search engine generated, and this is a result of a lot of hours doing search engine optimization, monitoring, and analyzing activity and where it comes from.

There is nothing like looking at your statistics, and seeing your come up on page one of a Google listing. When this happens you know your strategy is working. But nothing works forever and you have to be flexible and constantly adjusting your strategy.

Online shirt design programs can be beneficial and add to your bottom line if you are willing to take the time and effort to get them set up properly with systems and procedures that work. They are not push button, and they require daily monitoring and ongoing updates and adjustments. These are just a few tips to get you started and make you aware of some of the issues you will be dealing with.

 Blue Heron is the nations most well regarded authority for direct-to-garment printing on black t-shirts. Kevin Kelly can be reached at 800-709-2380.

10/03/2011
Little Falls, New Jersey 07424