I have agreements set up with several suppliers and am now in the process of selecting merch for my clothing store. I am having trouble with figuring how much inventory to start with. It would take me all of 5 seconds to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on inventory but don't have that kind of money. Does anyone know what a realistic starting inventory for an online clothing store is?

Are you going to be stocking the inventory and shipping it yourself or do your suppliers dropship?

If your suppliers dropship, I would reccomend going that route. No worries of having to keep up with where to stock everything, plus their cost for dropshipping is usually far lower than what it would cost you to ship it yourself.

If they don't dropship, or you prefer not to go that route, I would say that how much inventory you stock really depends on how much room you have to stock it. How big your budget for inventory is and the like.

fishrang
www.halfmoonsales.com
sales@halfmoonsales.com

I plan on stocking inventory and dropshipping. I think this will give me a larger inventory and betterp roduct mix. Storage is not a problem. I am having trouble coming up with a budget. Not to say that I have unlimited amounts of money, but I am somewhat flexible here which is why I was asking if anyone knew what a good starting inventory would be. I agree that dropshipping is a great route though and do plan on using that for at least half of my inventory.

A general rule of thumb is two tops to every bottom. For a store front most generally you have $100 of inventory for every square foot available.