Selling Used and Vintage Clothing Online

Before you think about donating the old dress or pair of shoes that’s been living in your closet for an untold length of time, you might be able to earn some money from those cast-offs by selling them online. But attempting to sell clothes online can be difficult if you have never done it before.

There is More Than One Thing to Consider

If your inventory of old clothing is significant, then you might want to look into your options, according to advice from Teen Vogue. An online classifieds site might be best for those looking to sell a few items. If you’ve added some kind of embellishments to your clothing items, then you may get more for them by selling them at online artisan sites.

Depending on how old your clothing is, one suggestion is that you may be able to target buyers looking for clothing from a specific time period.

Necessary Details

The fit of an item of clothing is one of the most important aspects of a successful vintage clothing sale. But it might be necessary to do some homework with regard to how much or whether or not sizes have changed. This will depend on how old the clothes you wish to sell online are. Perhaps the easiest way to go about the sizing issue is to simply take measurements of particular areas of the clothing, such as the bust, length and width of an item. While these measurements may not fit into the modern averages, they will help to give purchasers an idea of how a particular item may compare with modern sizing.

Do Your Homework

Studying how others have become successful at the sale of used and vintage clothing is one of the most important things you can do to be successful in your own right. The sale of clothing, particularly the vintage variety, requires some additional knowledge, such as the dating of certain garments and figuring out what kind of fabric a garment was made of in the event that garment tags have been lost or were not included.

As well, those wondering about how to start an online cloth store will need to know how to identify true vintage garments from modern copies, as this will greatly affect the price when you decide to resell items, says sammydvintage.com. Identifying vintage from new can be as simple as noticing a tag that you don’t recognize. But there may be more than one tag attached to the garment, in which case it makes sense to check all tags. One popular tag among vintage clothing hunters is the “union” tag. This tag usually contains a logo with ILGWU on it, and almost always indicates a vintage piece of clothing.

There are many resources online that detail not only vintage tags, but the incarnations of tags by popular stores over the decades. Collecting these sites can be a great help in assisting you with identifying the piece of clothing you are looking at or purchasing.

One thing that may also help is to know the vintage clothing labels from several different countries. Granted, you are likely to find more vintage clothing from the United States if you are shopping for it in the U.S. However, this may cause you to overlook quality vintage pieces from elsewhere in the world if you haven’t looked into identifying these labels

Understanding Different Clothing Sites

Those who want to let the customer determine the best price for an item may do well to set up shop on an online auction site, says Teen Vogue. This can also allow for more competition for the items you are selling, which can lead to an increased sense of urgency among customers, as well as increased popularity for your store.

Other sites may be more geared more toward the experience of shopping and less to the products themselves. These places are where one interested in starting his or her online clothing store may be able to be successful in such a setting.

Still others will have very versatile search engines that allow visitors to locate exactly what they’re looking for. This can mean much money earned by the individual looking to sell clothes online, as eager customers in these places are likely to know exactly what they are looking for.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Taking pictures of the items you are planning to sell is one thing. How you take them is another. Granted, there are many merits to taking close-up and faraway shots of piece of clothing that’s on a hanger.

However, those looking to sell used clothing online ‘dress to sell’, which means taking photos of the clothing items from varying angles. Any detail, such as a clothing item’s pattern, should be captured with a shot that zooms in. Reader’s Digest suggests that a piece of clothing that is worn by a friend who is modeling it can give the buyer an idea of what it looks like on the body. And your model friend won’t have to worry about how they look if you exclude any headshots from your clothing images.