How to Sell Clothes on eBay: Tips and Tricks

Whether you want to jump into entrepreneurship full-heartedly or just make some additional money on the side, learning how to sell clothes on eBay is both a profitable and fulfilling adventure.

Selling clothes online is a good way of making money, but it can also be challenging – timely advice can save a lot of hassle in the future. Just like with any other business venture, there are always some things to keep in mind.

We want you to embark on your journey with a clear understanding of what to expect from selling online. You’ll have to do some work, but don’t worry – if you follow this guide, it will make things a lot easier when you’re just starting out.

In this article, we’ll briefly look at what eBay is, learn how to define your target audience, pick a niche, create designs, market your clothes, and much more. In short, we’ve got the lowdown on everything you need to know about how to sell clothes on eBay and become a successful eBay seller.

What Is eBay?

As one of the leading online marketplaces in the world, eBay has amassed over 159 millions active buyers worldwide. Although it mostly acts as a customer-to-customer medium, in recent years, more and more companies have opened their own digital stores on eBay.

Anyone can create a seller account and get access to millions of potential buyers – it’s a place where merchants and customers come together. What’s more, you can use the eBay app to buy, sell, and browse straight from your phone.

Advantages of eBay:

• Large, pre-existing traffic, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom
• Ability to sell literally anything: new, custom, vintage, or used items
• Option to sell in bulk and resell
• Easy to set up

With this ever-popular marketplace, you can easily sell internationally – your online store can be accessed from anywhere in the world.

Source: Adobe Stock

The Basics of How to Sell Clothes on eBay

The first and one of the most important steps in learning how to sell clothes on eBay is to have a plan – no great company has started out without it.

A plant doesn’t have to be complicated to be profitable. The plan can be very simple – like choosing a print-on-demand business model. With this approach, you’ll only need to create a design, add it to your clothing items – be it t-shirts, hoodies, sportswear, or any other piece of clothing you wish – and publish them to your selling platform.

If you want to learn some helpful tips about how to sell clothes on eBay and make more money with less effort, keep reading, and you’ll be well on your way.

The Importance of Understanding Your Customer

Understanding your target audience is an essential part of learning how to sell clothes on eBay. If you’re selling online, the chances are, the competition is going to be tough, so you need your eBay listing to be created for a specific target audience.

You can’t just throw your designs out into the world and hope for the best. If you can figure out who you’re hoping to sell to the most, you can then figure out how to attract them.

Without devoted customers, your business will fail. To avoid losing without a fight, ask yourself the following questions:

• Who am I going to sell to?
• What are my customers interested in?
• How big is the target market?

If you’re wondering how to identify your customer’s interests, character traits, and unique needs, you can start by organizing them into different groups based on things they have in common – age, gender, education, or income level.

Whenever you want to sell something – be it new, used, or vintage clothing –, strive to make a personal connection and inspire emotion. You can do so with a design your customers will be proud to wear in public and a well-written product description.

Source: Adobe Stock

The Power of a Niche

If you want to sell clothes on eBay, competition is inevitable – offering something that other sellers don’t is a surefire way to stay ahead of the game. By picking a niche, you’ve won half the battle.

What is an eCommerce niche? In short, it’s a specialized market segment for particular products. Once properly defined, it yields many benefits – reduced competition, higher profits, and less money spent on advertising.

A niche can be anything – true crime, snowboarding, sleepy or happy cats. Whatever, really. A good way to pick a niche is by doing a little soul searching and finding what you’re passionate about.

By selling items that are one of a kind and fit a specific niche market, you’ve got the advantage of less competition.

Apart from exploring your own passions to find a profitable niche idea, a Google search bar can be of great help too. You can start by:

• Using Google Trends. Google Trends is a useful tool to quickly assess the popularity of any product or topic.
• Analyzing search results. Use Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, Ahrefs, or other tools to see what people search for.
• Examining best-selling products. Take time and deep dive into details, you might discover products that are about to explode in popularity.

In short, keep an eye out for trends, follow relevant groups on Facebook, Reddit, and other online communities and check how lively the conversation is – it’s a good indicator whether the niche you’ve chosen is in demand.

It is an extensive subject, and we can’t cover it fully here. However, if you’d like to learn more, our in-depth article explains how to find the right niche market, what niche marketing strategies are, and gives several examples of niche business ideas.

The Value of Style

Whenever you start learning how to sell clothes on eBay, there are some basics you should consider at the very beginning: the products you’re going to sell and their style. They go hand in hand with what we discussed previously – your target audience and niche, so keep that in mind. 

Before you open your business and start selling clothes on eBay, you should definitely consider these two things.

• What kinds of products are you going to sell? You should decide whether you want your clothing to come in various mediums such as t-shirts, sweatshirts, and dresses or if you want to stick strictly to one format such as hoodies.
• What kinds of designs are you going to use? You can go with either hand-drawn designs or simply buy some ready-made designs to put on your clothes – that’s up to you. We’ll learn more about how to create a design further in our article.

Whichever products and designs you choose, with our easy-to-use Mockup Generator, you can easily bring your vision to life and create real products that perfectly fit your chosen style and niche, thus appealing to your target audience.

Tips and Tricks for eBay Success

As many have discovered, selling clothes on eBay is a viable business venture. To become a truly successful eBay seller, there are several things you need to keep in mind, so we’ve prepared some useful information to get you started and practical tips to help you succeed.

Source: Adobe Stock

How to Get Started on eBay?

If you’re new to eBay, you should first familiarize yourself with our How to Sell on eBay guide. These handy instructions will lead you through the crucial steps to get started.

The guide goes over all the relevant information you need:

• How to set up an eBay account
• How to increase selling limits
• How to optimize eBay listings
• How to reactivate suspended eBay account, and much more

Printify and eBay enable anyone to start selling custom clothes without having to keep inventory, paying for packing materials, adding a shipping label, or rushing to the post office to ship the sold items to their customers.

How to Sell Clothes on eBay With Printify?

Whatever your ambitions are, our mission stays the same – to help you make more money with less effort. With Printify, you can easily create custom products to sell on eBay from the comfort of your home.

We are a transparent and easy-to-use platform enabling people from all walks of life to begin an exciting and financially rewarding entrepreneurial journey.

As soon as your item sells on eBay, our team does all the heavy lifting – printing, packaging, and shipping directly to your customer. Meanwhile, we’ll issue a tracking number, so you know – at all times –  where the order is.

Printify is 100% free, easy to use, and accessible to everyone. With just a few clicks, you can design, create, and sell a wide range of custom clothing without any worries whatsoever.

How to Create a Design That Sells?

Although eBay is a very competitive place, selling clothing with your own unique designs is an easy way to stand out from the crowd. If you’re worried whether you need artistic experience, don’t – anyone can come up with and bring their own designs to life.

If you’ve been to a thrift store, you already know one place where to look for inspiration, but there’s many more. The best being – you guessed it – the internet.

You can draw inspiration from sites like

• Dribbble
• Designious 
• Pinterest, and many others

A word to the wise –  you should only use this research as a starting point to create your own unique designs. Never plagiarize a design you find somewhere or claim it as your own.

However, if you want to save time, you can always hire a professional designer – there are plenty of sites you can use.

Some of the most popular ones are: 

• Fiverr – a site that allows you to hire a freelancer for your designs
• Upwork – the largest freelance marketplace in the United States
• 99designs – marketplace for graphic design services

With that said, take this only as a brief overview of your options, but if you’re interested in creating a design from scratch or useful sites that offer ready-made designs, our in-depth article offers a wide variety of information and advice, so you can create – or buy – a design with ease.

How to Present Your Clothes on eBay?

Although the quality and design of your products are important, you also need to learn how to present them in a way that highlights their worth to your customers.

The way you present your custom clothing can make or break your business – eMarketer has found that 83% of online purchase decisions are heavily influenced by images.

Poorly presented clothes won’t get as many views, and without those, you won’t gain customers, nor positive feedback.

Great photos sell – they engage and excite your potential buyers. Taking high-quality photos is one of the top things you need to learn when figuring out how to sell clothes on eBay.

Here are some of the things you should keep in mind when taking product photos.

• Place your clothes against a solid-colored background. You should use a plain white background for darker clothes and a dark – or black – background for light and white clothes.
• Use natural light. The lighting should be adequate. You can use natural lighting that’s complemented with other sources of light, so the area receives ample and – preferably – diffused light.

However, if you plan on selling clothes using print on demand, things are much easier – you don’t need access to a photography studio, arrange a photo shoot, search for a live model, tidy your messy bedroom or worry about natural light.

With our simple yet powerful Mockup Generator, you can create stunning and highly realistic mockups of your products in literally minutes. Use these mockups on your online storefront or social media for a professional look.

Images generated by Printify’s Mockup Generator

Presenting your custom clothing from different angles is vital. Customers want to see what your pieces look like from the front and back. It is a bit more difficult for used clothing, but if you’re using print on demand, our Mockup Generator quickly produces all the images you need.

How to Price Your Clothing?

The hassle of putting a price on your custom clothes can be a major issue when learning how to sell clothes on eBay – it’s one of the most difficult things to do in business generally. 

On the one hand, you don’t want to get ripped off of all your hard work and creativity, but you also don’t want to price it so high that no one will buy it. Remember, people shop on eBay to get a good deal.

When trying to decide on a price, you can start by asking yourself the following questions.

• How much would I pay for it? Take a step back and try looking at your clothing like a customer would.
• How much does a similar product cost? Look up similar clothing items and check for how much other people sell and base your pricing around that.

When learning how to sell clothes on eBay, exploring competition is key. You need to price your clothing items to make a profit. For the best results, try to aim for the middle ground.

If you want to find out how to set a good price for your products, our practical guide will teach you everything you need to know about price setting.

How Offering Free Shipping Can Increase Your Profits?

According to Invesp, 9 out of 10 customers say free shipping cost is the top incentive to shop online more. To further drive home the point, 93% of online buyers are encouraged to buy more if free shipping options are available.

It is a very good sales trigger, and it betters your odds of building a bigger customer base. However, you should price your products accordingly. Always make sure to include the shipping price in the product retail price to absorb the actual shipping costs.

Today, potential buyers – among various shipping methods – also expect free shipping. What’s more, expedited shipping options are even more welcome.

How to Write an Effective eBay Listing Title?

A well-thought-out title of your listing will help people to find your clothing items – it’s an opportunity to inform and excite your customers.

Always strive to make a clear and compelling first impression. Here are some tips for an effective title:

• Use descriptive keywords to accurately describe what you’re selling. You can use up to 80 characters, but you don’t need to use them all
• Add specifics. For example, include size, color, and condition
• Include item’s brand name, artist, or a designer
• Omit punctuation marks and asterisks

However, these are just a few of the most basic things you should keep in mind. If you’d like to learn more about how to write and what to avoid in your title, there’s no better source than eBay itself.

In a nutshell, the very best listings are clear, short, and precise. They allow customers to easily find what they’re looking for. The best practice is to search competitor titles that rank on the first page and adjust yours accordingly.

How to Write an eBay Product Description That Sells?

If you’re learning how to sell clothes on eBay, you won’t succeed without a little bit of writing. Writing a perfect product description for your products can be a bit tricky, but don’t overthink it – keep it simple and easy to read. A perfect description is:

• clear enough to tell your customer what they need to know;
• detailed enough so that there is no confusion.

Additionally, don’t forget to gather inspiration and examples from your competitor pages.

When describing your products – whether new or used clothing –, don’t use long sentences that might confuse your customers. If you want to craft the perfect description, make sure to familiarize yourself with eBay’s instructions.

However, if you’re not sure how you feel about your description, have a friend read through it to see if it makes sense. Ask for their honest opinion, and don’t get upset if they say something you don’t like – clear-headed, non-hyped, honest advice is worth its weight in gold.

How to Market Your Clothes?

Although you’re selling on a site where there are millions of customers, you still need to get your marketing right to ensure maximum exposure. Nobody can learn how to sell clothes on eBay without learning a bit about marketing.

How you’ll attract customers should be something you think about early on – your goal is to get noticed, drive traffic and provide reasons to buy from you.

There are a few ways you can market your business:

• Social media. By having a social media presence, you can find customers from all over the world. Social media is a great way to engage with your audience and promote your eBay store.
• Content marketing. A strategy that’s used by many eBay sellers. While it might be time-consuming, by consistently publishing relevant content – articles or product reviews – you’ll gain trust and build authority in your niche.
• Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is a great tool that can be applied to gain broader exposure. By collaborating with influencers who endorse your clothes, you’re able to quickly gain your audience’s trust.

If you want to learn more ways to attract potential buyers, look into some of your favorite clothing brands and see what they do – they often have departments full of brilliant people who work day and night trying to find ways to increase the company’s profits.

Closing Thoughts

As people continue to embrace the convenience of online shopping, selling on eBay is a great way to begin your entrepreneurial journey.

If you’re just starting out, we hope that this information, tips, and tricks on how to sell clothes on eBay will help you to get started, gain new customers, and increase your sales.

Yes, it’s true that selling clothes online can be difficult at first, but the end results can be exciting and lead to unprecedented profits. If you’ve worked hard on your designs and marketing, your clothes will fly off your digital shelves in a heartbeat.

Start Your Own Clothing Business Today!