For most apparel vendors, the retailers "own" the consumers, while the vendor "owns" the brand. So consumers will visit the websites of brands that they love, but in order to buy the products, they usually go to a store—over 90% of apparel sales occur in stores.

Combine that with the increasing importance of the Web for finding local stores—consider how often you use the Web instead of the Yellow Pages to find the address of a store—and you can see that it is very important for your retailers to have websites.

It is also important to have retailer websites that present your product well. Most websites for offline retailers are low-budget affairs that use poor or inconsistent product photography that does not present your product well.

What Retailer Websites Need

But this does not mean that your retailers need complex websites. They only need one well-designed page with these important attributes:

• Has the name of the store in text, not an image.
• Includes the names of the lines the store stocks, also in text.
• Shows the store's address and the names of nearby cities and major metro areas.
• Lists the categories of products the store carries.
• Has a few product photographs to indicate what the store sells.
• Is attractively designed.

Here is a perfect example of a single-page website that has most of these characteristics: Carizma On Cedros.

The Carizma on Cedros website was created by a professional Web designer, but we created a similar website as an example in about 10 minutes. This example site includes some of the important features that the original Carizma On Cedros site lacks:

• Text rather than images for the description of products and categories.
• A list of nearby cities.

Read more about how the example website was created at a blog post on the Fashion Business Inc. website.

Easy Websites Using a Blog

Setting up a retailer website was easy because we used blogging software from blogger.com, but after creating the website there are still a few more things to take care of. The website must be easy to find, and the website should represent your products well.

Making the website findable online is not so hard—just ensuring that the city names and product brands are listed on the website will probably get the retailer's website to rank well in Google searches. Ensuring products are well-represented is more difficult. For that, you, the vendor, will have to provide photographs.

Your vendor website should have a section for retailers to download photographs and other product information. Make sure that your retailers know about the site and know how to access it. Then when they create their 10-minute websites, they will have excellent product photographs to display.

Large retailers and vendors with their own retailer outlets understand these issues and are generally doing a great job promoting themselves on the Web. This same sort of Web promotion is available to smaller vendors and independent retailers, but vendors and retailers will have to work together to achieve it.