5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Dropship Apparel

I'm just going to state it up front: don't dropship apparel, okay? Let's take a look at why this is not a good idea.

Dropshipping apparel online isn't a good business model for several reasons. I'm not against selling apparel in general, and in fact, I personally have a clothing label that I've been working on for many years. If it's your passion, you should go for it, and be aware that it's a difficult thing to get right. I would not dropship apparel for profit, I would do it only for passion. 

If you're just looking for a profitable business model, dropshipping apparel isn't likely to work out for you. There are a lot of issues that can and will arise, and dealing with them will eat into your profit margin and cause all kinds of headaches.

First, there's a very high return rate. When people buy clothing online they can't try it on, so they buy their usual sizes, but items listed as the same size often fit differently. So, if someone normally wears a large and they put your shirt on and it doesn't fit like they were expecting, you'll get a return.

Another downside of online apparel shopping is that you can't judge the feel of the material. If you don't have really good quality material, or it's not what a customer is used to, you'll get a return. Every aspect of clothing is like this: fit, fabric, and how it's assembled all are important and if they're not what a customer wanted, they'll send it back.

This all leads to a very minimal profit margin. You have to understand all the costs that go into getting clothing made, tagged, bagged, printed, shipped... it all eats into that profit margin, and it's not really that much to start with. So, according to our dropshipping model, it's not really a good niche.  

The price point is too low to create a good profit margin. If you're going to be selling lots, and it does become a really big and popular business, you might do all right, but you do need to ship lots of units to make a good profit.

It's just easier to sell a more expensive product. You still have to pay to get people to your store, so if you can get them to buy a more expensive product, you only have to ship one, compared to the 50 shirts you need to make the same profit.

When it comes to actually building the website, you're going to have lots and lots of variants because you've got size, color, style, and more to consider. The variants just go on and on and on. I've done this before and it does become a very big headache and a lot of extra work and cost.

If you really want to get into the apparel game, here are some suppliers and ways that you can get your hands on the actual gear:

You can go to Alibaba. That's not a new idea but it does take a little bit of time to search through all the listings and find ones that are good and legitimate. I've spent thousands of dollars trying to get very good quality products and people shipping on time. Getting the minimum quantity for orders down is quite hard because over in China, they really do push to have a large minimum quantity order or MOQ.

And that means you've got to have a lot of money, because each style and size and color adds up very quickly. Even though they are much cheaper than what you would pay here in Australia or in the USA, but it still does add up. 

A local supplier is probably best when you're first starting. I would source a local supplier and deal with them for a much smaller quantity to test the market. You can see their quality straight away, ask them just to print a few samples, and they're more than happy to do that most of the time, so you can you can get the feel for it.

The only problem is that you generally use a blank t-shirt. So, if you have a brand in mind, you really do want to have everything covered. You'll need to have your neck tag done, you want to have a side tag with all the washing instructions, and the print on the front or the back of the sleeve or whatever.

Smaller suppliers don't often do the inside of the neck tags and they might use a blank with a guild and tag in there or an IS color or something like that. So keep that in mind as well.

You can also use print-on-demand suppliers. This is a much better option because you don't need to make a large initial purchase. If you do decide to go into the apparel market, you're going to be making a lower profit margin but the benefit is you don't have to spend any money on the initial outlay.

You can go to Fiverr or other freelance sites and get twenty or thirty designs made up. Upload them all to the shop, and then every time someone orders, they'll print that on demand and ship directly to the customer.

I'm not sure if print-on-demand suppliers have the relabeling in the back of the shirts, so for that, you'll have to look that up yourself. So there's a much cheaper option, but your profit margins are very, very small when you're talking about doing it that way.

Finally, the next and probably best option is to go to the Canton Fair in Guangzhou

China and meet with the suppliers themselves. Pick the shirts up, feel them, try them on. You can find shirts, dresses, wetsuits, whatever you're thinking about doing. The Canton Fair is just the best place to source these things.

You can meet everybody and do the deals right there in front of everyone. Right there, there's no guesswork. The note here is that you do need to contact suppliers beforehand and generate a relationship, because you do need an invitation from a supplier to go to the Canton Fair.

I could probably go on about this for a long time. I've been doing this for many years with my brand, and I'm still not at the point where I want to be with my brand. I get distracted with all my dropshipping stuff as well.

If you do have any more questions about this topic, I’d be more than happy to answer anything. So just shoot us a question over at www.dropshipdownunder.com.au 

THINKING OF DROP SHIPPING IN AUSTRALIA?

6 Things You MUST Know Before You Do Revealed In This Free Drop Shipping Course! CLICK HERE - http://bit.ly/dsdstartercourse