Questions About ONLINE STORES

Our Online Stores work best for organizations with a known, clearly defined group of potential buyers and a reliable way to communicate with them - for example, a school, sports team, club, association, workplace, fitness group, healthcare organization, church, charity, or other membership-based group.

They are particularly useful when you want to offer branded apparel or merchandise to your members, with or without a fundraising or profit component.

There is a fixed setup fee paid by the organization in advance to create the store. As a general rule of thumb, we recommend an Online Store when you reasonably expect to sell about 100 items or more. This is not a minimum sales requirement; it is simply a useful guideline for deciding whether a store makes sense for your group.

An Online Store is probably not the right fit if you do not have a defined audience or an effective way to reach potential buyers, if you expect only a small number of sales, if items need to be produced and shipped immediately as each order is placed, or if you are looking for an always-open Print-on-Demand store.

Our online stores operate as temporary Pop-Up Stores, rather than always-open Print-on-Demand (POD) stores.

With one of our Pop-Up Stores, the store is normally open for a predetermined ordering period. Your members place and pay for their individual orders through the store. Once the store closes, we combine the orders and produce the garments together as a larger production run.

This allows us to use traditional screen printing for printed apparel, rather than producing individual pieces one at a time. Your organization can also build a fundraising or profit component into the selling prices if desired.

There is a fixed setup fee, paid by the organization in advance, to create and operate the store. Because of that cost - and the work involved in promoting and managing a successful store - we generally recommend our Online Stores for organizations that reasonably expect to sell about 100 items or more.

An always-open Print-on-Demand store works differently. Individual garments are generally produced as each order is received using decoration methods suited to one-off production and are then shipped individually. We do not offer that type of individual Print-on-Demand service.

Our Pop-Up Store model is particularly well suited to schools, teams, clubs, organizations, and other groups that can promote a store to their members for a defined ordering period and then have all of the orders produced together. Individual orders placed through one of our stores can be shipped as arranged for that particular store.

No. Our Online Stores are created and hosted by us and do not integrate directly with third-party online selling platforms such as Shopify.

The store we create for your organization is a complete standalone ordering store: your members can view the products, place their individual orders, and pay online through the store we provide. You do not need to create or maintain a separate e-commerce store for the program.

If you already have your own website or other online presence, you can direct your members to the Online Store we create for you.

Once you've decided that an Online Store is appropriate for your organization, the process is fairly straightforward.

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend an Online Store when you reasonably expect to sell about 100 items or more. There is a fixed setup fee paid by the organization in advance to create the store.

1. Choose the products you would like to offer. Our standard Online Store setup includes up to four different garment styles, with each garment available in up to four fabric colours. You can select products from our catalogue yourself, or we can recommend products based on popularity, price, style, or the needs of your organization.

2. Decide how the products will be decorated. Send us your artwork - or even your artwork ideas - and let us know what you have in mind. Depending on the products, decoration may include screen printing, embroidery, or another appropriate method.

3. Decide whether you want to include fundraising or profit. If so, let us know how much you would like to add to the selling prices. Organizations will sometimes use part of their fundraising component to help recover the cost of setting up the store.

4. We build your store. We'll prepare the product mockups and create the online store showing the products and designs you've selected.

5. You review it before it opens. We'll give you an opportunity to review the store and approve it before it goes live.

6. The store opens for a predetermined ordering period. You promote the store to your members, who place and pay for their own orders online.

7. The store closes and we produce the orders. After the closing date, we combine the orders and move them into production.

8. The completed orders are distributed or shipped according to the arrangements for your store.

9. If your store includes fundraising, we provide your organization with the funds raised.

Our standard Online Store setup includes up to four different garment styles.

Each garment can be offered in up to four different fabric colours, giving your members some choice without making the store unnecessarily complicated.

If you would like to offer more than four garment styles, we may be able to accommodate that as an expanded store setup. Additional setup charges may apply for garment styles beyond those included in the standard store.

We can also help you choose products that work well together and are appropriate for your organization, artwork, and budget. Individualization or personalization may also be available for suitable products for an additional charge.

We like to involve the Group Organizers as much as possible in the Store Setup, includng messaging and branding, so the Store will look just as you like when it goes "live"!

Even better, we provide an Administrative Portal for the Group Organizers that allows them to get a sneak peek of how the Store will look when it launches, so they can request any tweaks that they wish to see.

Not very long!

Once you have let us know WHAT garments you'd like up on the store, and provided us with HOW you'd like them decorated (artwork approvals), we can typically have your store set up in under a week.

We establish the base selling prices for the products offered in your Online Store based on the garments, decoration, and other production requirements.

If your organization would like to use the store as a fundraiser, you can choose to add a fundraising amount to the selling price of the products. The fundraising amount can be different for different products if you wish. The additional amount collected through those sales is returned to your organization after the store is complete.

There is also a fixed setup fee paid by the organization in advance to create the Online Store. Some organizations choose to take that cost into account when deciding how much fundraising to build into their selling prices.

The standard store setup includes up to four different garment styles, with each garment offered in up to four fabric colours. If you would like a larger or more complex store, please discuss it with us. Additional setup charges may apply.

As a general rule of thumb, we recommend an Online Store when an organization reasonably expects to sell about 100 items or more. This isn't a minimum sales requirement, but it is a useful guideline for determining whether an Online Store makes sense for your group.

Pricing is shown before applicable taxes and delivery charges, if any. The fundraising portion can be made visible to your members if you wish, and the total amount raised can also be displayed on the Store homepage if desired.

All payment is collected by us, through the Store, usually via MasterCard or Visa.

The entire order is paid for, including applicable taxes, saving Group Organizers the hassle of collecting payment from individuals.

If you've added a Fundraising or Profit component to your Store, we remit that portion to your Group separately, when the store has closed.

We generally recommend keeping an Online Store open for about 1-2 weeks. Because these are Pop-Up Stores, production of the orders begins only after the store closes.

We typically see a lot of orders in the first few days after a store opens, followed by another flurry as the closing date approaches. Keeping the ordering period reasonably short also helps avoid an unnecessarily long wait for the people who order early.

A store can be reopened again later if there is enough demand. In some situations, a new ordering period can even begin while the orders from the previous store opening are being produced.

If you expect to reopen the store periodically, let us know and we can discuss the timing that makes the most sense for your group.

We will provide you with everything you need to direct your Members and Supporters to the Store!

The Store itself is hosted through our website, here:  Online Stores  We will help you direct your members to this page, where they will find your store.

The Group Organizer (or Organizers) will be given special access to an Organizer Portal that helps to spread the word about your Store, and where to find it.  You can use this Portal to communicate with your members if you wish.  We do find, however, that most Groups already have a Membership Mailing List that they use to reach all of their Members and Supporters, and they often prefer to use that list.

We provide you with a Flyer that you can share with your members, and which shows the products you have on your store, along with instructions and a clickable link to access the Store.

The Portal also allows the Group Organizer to share the Store via Twitter and Facebook, if you wish.

Members should generally expect to receive their items approximately 2-3 weeks after the store closing date.

Once the store closes, we assemble all of the garments that have been ordered and then print, embroider, or otherwise produce them. Production usually takes about two weeks. After that, orders that are being shipped are subject to normal shipping times to their destination.

It is important to remember that garments are not produced and shipped on the same day that an individual places an order. Someone who orders on the first day the store opens will therefore wait through the remainder of the ordering period, production, and any applicable shipping time. This is one reason we generally recommend keeping the store open for only about 1-2 weeks.

We can do it either way.

One bulk shipment to a single location is included. This is often the simplest and most economical option - for example, shipping all completed orders to your school, team, office, or organization for distribution.

Even though the orders are shipped together in bulk, each customer's order is individually packaged and clearly labelled with who it belongs to and what they ordered. The organizer does not have to sort through all of the merchandise to figure out who gets what. Once the bulk shipment arrives, distributing the individual packages to your members is relatively simple.

If the organizer would like completed orders sent in bulk to additional locations, the organizer is responsible for those additional shipping charges.

Online Stores can also be set up so that individual customers have their orders shipped directly to them. In that case, each individual customer pays the applicable shipping charge for their own order when ordering through the store.

We'll establish the appropriate shipping or distribution arrangement with you when the store is set up.