Many young generations nowadays set up their businesses online believing it as an effective carrier to achieve their careers of original designing. Yet their shops seldom receive orders.

It’s an admirable but meaningless decision to go on selling original designed products in this given situation. Remember, setting up a profitable business can be a really time-consuming process. Before dreaming about having thousands of clients in hand, better first do something to get your business built from the ground up.

Take phone-case-customization as example. Besides original designing, there are also design modes like customer customization, or simply buying some hot-selling graphics online.

At the beginning period of your online business, to promise profit, it’s more recommended to:

Phone cases first are invented to protect our mobile phones and are designed with simple outlines and similar materials. With phone case market becoming bigger and bigger, new phone case materials like bamboo or wool felt gradually emerged, refreshing the industry.

Though these new materials sometimes do present fashionable and eye-catching visual effects, as customized phone case sellers, we need to consider more about the practicability of materials, rather than their playfulness.

Take bamboo and leather phone case for example, phone cases made from natural materials often require careful storage to avoid moisture damage, mold growth, or degradation over time.

Materials like metal or glass do present elegant outer looks but need to be protected from any potential scratching during the printing and transportation process.

Also Thermoplastic Polyurethane (TPU). TPU is a popular material for phone cases due to its elasticity and durability, but they need to be stored in rather careful methods to avoid creasing or sticking together.

Just like so, there are indeed lots of materials suitable for making amazing phone cases, but not all of them are easy to handle. Take some time to understand their loves and hates will save you from much potential troubles.

Besides phone case material per se, another important thing to do is to apply the right printing methods on the right materials.

Many printing methods are in fact suitable for quite limited materials. For instance, screen printing better be practised on hard plastic, wood or metal; embossing printing better on PU or real leather. Applying a new material always mean a new and long journey in finding a reliable printing partner.

Yet a digital UV printer can help you out of that trouble. UV printing is suitable for most phone case materials, like acrylic, wood, metal, plastic and so forth.  An UV printer normally is equipped with adjustable UV lights. The printer first prints out graphics on your phone case, then the UV lights will follow close behind to immediately cure the printed ink and make them stick on your phone case firmly.

With an UV printer in hand, you don’t have to mediate among countless printing companies with their limited techniques on limited materials. Instead, you can censor and adjust the printing quality at times; you can also practise printings on different materials to achieve best printing effects presented; and you're always free to produce phone cases with your artworks(first in a small quantity) to test how far they can go on the online market.

There are sellers simply putting their phone case in a plastic seal bag then in an express box then to their buyers. It’s okay but it’s not recommended.

It doesn’t matter you’re doing phone case business of acrylic, wood or glass, use a plastic case that can thoroughly protect your phone case as the first layer packaging. When your customer receive a phone case staying firm in an upright plastic case, they will tend to believe that the phone case is durable, tough and with higher quality.

For the second layer packaging, if customized express boxes are way too expensive, try customized stickers instead. Design a logo or slogan for your shop and make them into stickers, paste them on the express box of every order - let your clients clearly know where does this good phone case come from.

Some people believe data analysis is only needed for bigger companies. Yet if you plan to start a long-term business, no matter it’s big or small, thriving or declining, understanding your clients and orders via data analysis is absolutely necessary.

Sometimes you don’t even need any professional tools or websites to do that, all you have to do is to aggregate your sales data in a spreadsheet and use some formulas or diagrams to visualize the data changes.

For example, calculate your numbers of deals and sales revenue periodically - performance too low? Maybe it’s time to hold a sales promotion; analyze your customers - several returned clients already? Ask for their comments on your shop ; figure out the average time to close an order - super long lead time? Does it have anything to do with the printing or shipping companies?

An effective analysis of your sales data will be great help to your sales forecast and business development.