So my site is in the hip hop niche. I was thinking about maybe buying 30-40 custom t-shirts and selling them on the site. There are plenty of sites that will sell bulk custom t-shirts for not too bad of a price. I would probably only go into eCommerce after I built up more web traffic, so that I could be more confident of selling enough shirts to make it worth my while. But here's my question: is it worth it? I would have to set up my bank account for the eCommerce, get some kind of shopping cart software, and have some way to take credit cards online. PLUS--I would be packaging and shipping all the orders myself. So is it even possible to change a simple blog to sell one or two items for a little extra profit?
I would have 1 - 5 shirts made and see if your friends would be interested in buying them first. If they are interested, then the general public may also be interested. If things go well, you could get the gear to make the tshirts yourself. Are you running WordPress on your blog? You can start an ecommerce shop on there. All you need is a shopping cart like WP ecommerce: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-e-commerce/ After the work and cost of packaging and shipping, you could figure out your profit margin and decide if it was worth your while.
You don't need to make shirts at all first... Instead you can try creating site, create a 'buy page' where you ask details from the potential customer (address, name - no credit card though )... after he clicks "done" you then inform that "right now we are out of T-shirts, but email us bla bla blah" - and count those "purchases". With a small test you can easily see if people would indeed purchase stuff from you.
I agree its best to test the market first - make sure people actually want to buy before you commit to buying stock.
You don't really need to make a bank account to start off with. Just use paypal, that will process all of the cards for you, most people like it as well. And as for the t-shirts there are normally a few places out there that will dropship your designs for you, have a look into that at the start, you won't make as much money, but if it don't work out you won't loose loads because of stock you can't sell.
Blonde Jon - Thanks for the plugin. That will definitely be helpful Game Producer - It seems like that's kind of annoying to a customer, but it would be helpful eFishy - okay thanks, I'll definitely just stick with paypal at first. I'll probably avoid drop shipping though, because I would rather be sure of every transaction that goes down, and I'd like to see the merchandise myself before the customer receives it, because I'm accountable for anything faulty
Yeh, it's probably a bit annoying but... if you make it so that "sorry guys that we don't have shirts right now, but if you want we can inform you when the shirts are available again - and give you 10% to thank you for your patience" (or something)