Within the early years of your blogshop industry (2006-2008), the owners had been young females aged among 16 and 20. Most of them had been nonetheless in college and didn’t start out out together with the aim of being entrepreneurs. Lots of thought it was a entertaining and easy way of promoting off their secondhand apparel on the web, along with the revenue earned from these sales would go towards funding their future style purchases.













Immediately after a couple of months, some realized the potential of style e-commerce along with the large market of prospects who had been willing to spend among $15 to $40 to get a piece of clothing on line without having needing a physical fitting. Hunting to fulfill the demand of their consumers, these owners went to supply from apparel importers at City Plaza in Singapore and a few even went on frequent sourcing trips to Bangkok to bring back significant supplies of inexpensive clothing.






How do they sell clothing on blogs?






It seemed questionable to start a small business employing Livejournal blogs together with the lack of a correct internet framework, inventory handle, checkout and payment processing systems. But these young female entrepreneurs had been not deterred and came up with various one of a kind hacks. The four points under had been important things that contributed to the achievement and reputation of Dress blogshop within the competitive e-commerce industry:






1. Weekly time-specified launches






As a tiny organization starting out, it would be difficult to stock up clothes in hundreds of various designs with no incurring massive expenses of warehouse storage expense and labour expenses. Alternatively, blogshops introduced a series of 5 to ten different styles with restricted availability within the type of a themed collection format. The collection would launch weekly at night amongst 7pm and 10pm, and customers were informed through email newsletter a number of days prior to the actual launch.






2. Backorders






Backorders were available a handful of days soon after a productive promoting out of a collection launch; it also gave those shoppers who missed out on the launch an chance to buy sold out designs. It was assured earnings for the owners, as buyers would ought to spend upfront to purchase sold out styles that had been on backorder. Backorders would take two to six weeks to arrive before they were shipped to clients. The amount of designs out there on a backorder was an indicator of your recognition of a blogshop.






3. Gmail






Gmail was a must-have tool of any blogshop owner. Firstly, It was made use of to challenge order invoices manually to consumers soon after they commented around the items they wanted on Livejournal. Secondly, blogshops sent mailers in bulk to inform consumers of pending launches along with the arrival of backorders. Thirdly, Gmail labels had been employed as a tool to maintain track of individuals who had produced payment by tallying the payment specifics of buyers’ bank accounts against the owners’ bank accounts. Well-known blogshops often exceeded Gmail’s 500 day-to-day messages sending limit throughout the launch of a brand new fashion collection.






4. Trust






Payment is definitely an significant mechanism to close the buy loop in e-commerce. On the other hand when purchasing at blogshops, purchasers had no decision but to trust sellers with upfront payments to sellers’ accounts. POSB/DBS world-wide-web banking was the principal selection of payment accepted by sellers, but buyers generally had to wait up to 48 hours for their payment to become manually verified by sellers by means of email.






There was no payment protection for sellers within the case of non-fulfilled orders, thus buyers preferred purchasing in the extra preferred Dress blogshop to prevent getting scammed. While it was slow and inefficient for owners to confirm just about every single payment email, there had been no transaction costs involved and most consumers had an active POSB or DBS account.






Remain tuned for portion two of my look in the blogshop phenomenon exactly where I'll speak about the golden age of blogshops as well as the major blogshops in Singapore.