Sell T-Shirt Online in Malaysia?
Early this month, we read a report about Selling T-Shirts Is Big Business on Web. Aizuddin Danian also higlighted it in Making a fortune on the ‘Net. Will it works for Malaysian?
Darren has some tips on selling T-shirt on a blog(contributed by chris).
- Do not use Cafepress
- Be creative
- Find good printer*. Order in bulk to save cost.
- Don’t be afraid to set an aggressive price point.
*One that prints, not the one on your table.
Printing
I haven’t try Cafepress before, don’t know about the quality. It is free and easy to setup, you can start selling your very own shirt in few minutes. But, it is not cheap. Your reader need to pay USD$19(RM72.20) for a white tee. :shock:
Personally, I think the reasonable price for online T-shirt is around RM25 to RM35. There are quite a number of Malaysia companies do custom T-shirt printing. However, they mostly print in bulk. The more you print, the cheaper is the cost. Therefore, unlike Cafepress, you need to know how many order first before you print.
Of course, you can print in small amount, but the cost is high. It will cost more than RM40 for single custom shirt, as far as I know.
Shipping
Beside printing, you will need to do the shipping(if not using Cafepress). According to POS Malaysia, here are the shipping rate within Malaysia (assume the package weight is 1KG)
- Normal mail(Parcel): RM2.50
- Pos Ekspres: RM7.00(box size: 340mm x 250mm x 25mm)
- PosLaju(Merchandise): RM10.50 to RM35 (Depends zones, refer the rate chart for detail)
Payment Method
I believe you don’t have a online payment gateway. The cheapest(Free!) and fastest payment method for Malaysian will be online banking. Major banks have the online banking services, you need to register separately though.
If you want to accept online credit card payment, you can register a online credit card payment processing service, like 2CheckOut and PayPal.
2Checkout is more for serious business. It cost one-time-fee USD$49 to setup. It has complete system to handle your sales. The rate is 5.5% commission plus a $0.45 charge on each total sale.
On the other hand, PayPal is free registeration. Cost per transaction is 2.9% + $0.30 USD. PayPal also provide some merchan tools. But, the major problem about PayPal for Malaysian and some other countries is that we CANNOT withdraw money from PayPal account. You need to find somebody to buy your PayPal money and bank into your local bank account. There are a few guys I know doing it at a <3.8 exchange rate.
Does it sell?
Technical problem of selling online T-shirt can be solved, the problem is how is your website readers response?
Big site like Project Petaling Street is getting less than 40 pre-order of Official PPS T-shirt.
Thought:
Will you buy a Tech Gadgets Blog T-shirt? I probably need to get someone to design the T-shirt if I gonna to sell it.
