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How to Start a Phone Case Business: Startup Guide

Filed Under: Online business ideas

Selling Phone Cases Online

Learn everything that you should know about how to start a phone case business online. Here you can learn how to find phone cases, how to make custom phone cases, and where to sell them.

Selling phone cases is a popular online business idea. It is an easy and low-risk business to start. That means there are a lot of sellers out there selling phone cases online. So, apart from talking about how to start a phone case business, here we are also going to introduce a strong marketing strategy to sell your phone cases online.

What can you learn from this guide?

  • Which phone cases sell better online
  • How to create an online store to sell phone cases
  • How to use print-on-demand make customized phone cases
  • How to use dropshipping to sell phone cases online, and
  • Which marketing strategy works well for an online phone case business

How much does it cost to start a phone case business?

Starting an online business doesn’t cost much. In fact, you can start an online phone case business for less than $200 in hand. This $200 includes the cost of starting your very own online store and running the first ad campaign.  Well, depending on where you live, you might have to get a business registration to run an online business as well. If it is the case, you will have to check with the local authorities about the business registration fees.

Please note that here we are going to talk about using dropshipping or print-on-demand services to sell phone cases. With dropshipping, you don’t have to buy anything before you are making a sale. So, nothing goes out of your pocket to build an inventory. That is why you don’t need a big fat budget to start an online phone case business.

Can you make money selling phone cases?

Selling phone cases is an evergreen business. Everyone has a mobile phone in their hand, and they need a phone case. And, some people (usually girls) buy a set of phone cases in different colors, so they can change them to match their outfits. Likewise, if you do proper product selection, targeting, and marketing, you can sell around 5-10 phone cases every day without much effort (based on our experience). Now let us do the maths to find how much money you can make selling phone cases.

You can find an iPhone 11 case on AliExpress for less than $2. And, you can sell it for like $20 on an online store. Then, usually, it cost around 50% of the selling price for other costs, like payment gateway fees, advertising costs, shipping, etc. So, it gives you about $8 profit for each phone case you sell. That means you can make around $40 – $80 as profits every day by selling phone cases online.

Oh, Wait! You might feel like $40 a day is not enough. But, remember that you can make this $40 without having to spend more than an hour or two in front of a computer at night. That is the beauty of online businesses. Isn’t that an easy way to make money online?

How to start a phone case business

Here are the steps to start a successful online phone case business.

  1. Select the best selling phone cases
  2. Find the most popular trends to make or re-sell phone cases
  3. Make custom phone cases
  4. Find wholesale suppliers to re-sell phone cases
  5. Create an online store to sell phone cases
  6. Create a failproof marketing strategy for your phone case business
Selecting the best selling phone cases

Choose and target around 5-7 most popular mobile phone brands/types. You don’t have to sell phone cases for every phone on the earth. It won’t worth your effort.

Find the most popular trends to make or re-sell phone cases

Find popular phone case types and designs to sell online. You have to keep up with the trends to offer the most intriguing products in your store.

Make custom phone cases

How hard is it to make phone cases in bulk? Well, making custom phone cases is a lot easier than you think. There are plenty of online tools to get this done. We’ll talk about this in a bit.

Find wholesale suppliers to re-sell phone cases

If you are not a good designer, maybe it is a good idea to find a Chinese wholesale supplier for phone cases and re-sell their products in your store. Also, you can start dropshipping phone cases too. If so, you don’t even need to worry about shipping the products you sell.

Create an online store to sell phone cases

You can build an eCommerce store, or list your products on an online marketplace to sell phone cases online. We’ll talk about the pros and cons of these two options in a bit.

Create a failproof marketing strategy for your phone case business

Everyone can make phone cases and list them on an online store. But, only a few can develop a successful marketing strategy for their stores. Here we will discuss how to build a failproof marketing strategy for your phone case business.


1. Find the best selling phone cases

There are thousands of different devices in the market. And, obviously, you cannot make or sell, phone cases for each of these device types. So, you need to pick the most popular devices to start a phone case business. So, make sure to pick just one or two brands, with five to seven device types. For example, if you choose iPhones, you can select the most popular and latest models.

There is a neat little trick to find winning products for dropshipping. Here is how to do it.

You know, Amazon is the largest eCommerce store. So, that is the best place to find the best selling phone cases. Go to Amazon’s best sellers page for mobile phone accessories and see what people buy. So, you can pick the most popular brands and phone case types to sell online.

2. Find popular phone case types and designs

There are many different types of popular phone cases. So, when starting a phone case business, you need to have a good knowledge of such trends.

Thin flat type phone cases

Thin flats are a popular choice for print-on-demand phone cases. These phone cases are often made with PVC or rubbery silicon material. You can find thin flats for low prices, compared to the other phone case types. So, don’t forget to add these types of phone cases to your store.

Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

Rugged phone cases

Rugged phone cases are also a good choice for an online store. These cases visually align with a dark-themed, masculine store design. Also, you can easily find the dropshipping phone case suppliers for the heavy-duty, rugged phone cases.

Photo from Aliexpress

Bumper phone cases

Bumper cases add extra protection around the edges of the phones. The bumper cases are usually made with a shock-resistant material to absorb the socks. Some bumper cases only cover the sides of the phone, and some bumper cases are just the thin flat types with an extra protective layer at the edge.

Photo from Aliexpress

Fabric phone cases

Fabric phone cases are also catching up in the trends lately. Those phone cases are especially popular among the eco-friendly consumer communities. Also, fabric phone cases can be modified using embroidery designs, painting, or even printing.

Photo from Aliexpress

Wallet phone cases

If you remember our screenshot about the search volumes for phone cases, you would have noticed that “iPhone case with wallet” had a high demand. So, wallet phone cases can be another great addition to your phone case product portfolio. There are different types of wallet phone cases. Some wallet phone cases with foldable designs and some are super minimalistic with only a set of credit-card holders.

Photo from Aliexpress

3. Choose whether to re-sell or design your phone cases

As we have mentioned in the beginning, when you start a phone case business, you can re-sell the phone cases from wholesale suppliers, or you can make phone cases to sell online.

Re-sell phone cases (Start Dropshipping)

Re-selling phone cases from the dropshipping suppliers are one of the easiest (and, cheapest) ways to start a phone case business.

Since you don’t have to maintain a product stock with dropshipping, you can just add or remove the products from your store to meet the trends. Also, since the dropshipping suppliers will take care of the shipping and order fulfilment, you can use your full steam on business development and marketing.

Finding dropshipping suppliers is not a hard thing to do. The easiest way is to dropship from Aliexpress. Also, if you decide to build your phone case store on Shopify, you can use Oberlo to find dropshipping products too.

But, if you like to earn more profits, you can find real wholesale suppliers for phone cases. We have a whole list of wholesale dropshipping supplier directory on Ecommercebuff. Check it out find the dropshipping suppliers for the phone cases.

Btw, what is dropshipping?

Dropshipping is a simple way to fulfill (deliver) the products that you sell on your online store. If you start dropshipping, you don’t have to purchase an inventory of the products to start selling. All you have to do is forwarding the sales orders to your suppliers. Then, they will pack and ship the products to your customers directly.

Additional reading: How to start a dropshipping business

Make phone cases to sell online

As you can understand, selling phone cases can be a competitive business segment. So, if you need to get some competitive advantage, you might need something to make yourself different from your competitors.

There are many online tools and services to design your own phone cases

Making phone cases is not that complicated. Now there are some print-on-demand services, which even handle the shipping and order fulfillment for you. Print-on-demand services like printful have easy-to-use phone case design tools to create your own designs and to generate mockups. The best thing is, you can even use these mockups (images) to create listings on your online phone case store without having to print a product.

Isn’t that a low-risk, and low-cost way to start a phone case business?

Here is an example of a phone case design that I made using printful’s design tools. Beautiful huh?

If you are not getting any design ideas, do not worry. Just surf around Pinterest to get plenty of design inspirations. Or, you can even hire a freelancing designer on Fiverr or UpWork to get your designs done.

Find a freelancer to design phone cases for just $10. So, you can save time to focus on developing your phone case business.

Hire an online freelancer to design phone cases

Hire a professional designer for less than $20 to get stunning phone case designs.

Hire Now

Once you come up with a design, generate the mockups using the above tools, and use social media to validate your design. Post your mockups on Facebook or Instagram and measure the amount of engagement and positive comments to get a better idea of your design.

Start an online store to sell phone cases

5. Build an online shop to sell phone cases online

Starting an online store won’t cost you a fortune. You can even create an eCommerce store without any technical knowledge. For instance, if you use Shopify, you can find plenty of easy-to-use plugins, themes, and templates to get started. And, you can even use the apps like Oberlo to find and manage dropshipping suppliers on Shopify.

It won’t cost you more than $29 a month to sell phone cases on an online store. So, learn the steps to create an online store without any technical knowledge.

Try Shopify for FREE

7. Sell phone cases online on marketplaces

However, if you are running low on cash, you can start by listing your phone cases on online marketplaces like eBay. However, if you are dropshipping, make sure to have a proper sales agreement with your wholesale supplier before listing your products on eBay. A lot of people just use dropshipping from Aliexpress to sell on eBay. But, if the eBay found out this process, they will suspend your account.

Apparently, dropshipping is allowed on eBay, as long as you can prove that you have a reliable supply of products. You can prove this by providing a dropshipping agreement from your supplier. Check out our beginner’s guide start selling on eBay for more details.

6. Create a failproof marketing strategy for your phone case business

Digital marketing is a must-have skill for any business owner. So, in this post, we’ll talk about the four most impactful marketing strategies for a phone case business.

  • Paid advertising
  • Using social media
  • Content marketing
  • Influencer marketing

Paid advertising for your phone case business

To be honest, you cannot run a business without paid ads. Well, you can, but you will not be able to make enough sales. You can run paid ads on Google and on social media platforms like Facebook. In the beginning, forget all other paid channels and just focus on advertising on Facebook.

There is a reason to focus only on Facebook ads. The paid advertising for online business has to be done very carefully. As a beginner, you will find it is hard to measure and keep track of the cost of conversions.

And, sometimes your paid ads won’t work from the very first try. Most of the time, you need to do a little bit of tweaking to make it work. If you do not understand this, your paid ad campaigns can go wild and eat up all your marketing budget without making any sales.

Trust me; I have a firsthand experience losing more than $2000 for this very reason.

So, in the beginning, only focus on a single paid channel. Facebook ads are cheaper and easy to analyze. You can start from there and later grow your paid advertising to multiple channels.

Read more: How to advertise your business on Google for FREE

Use social media marketing to start a phone case business

2.5 billion people are waking up to social media. So, if your phone case business does not have a proper social media marketing strategy, you are basically leaving your money on the table.

Building a strong social media marketing strategy is a whole new subject. So, it worth spending a little more time understanding how to use social media to sell better. We have created a comprehensive guide to learn how to build a strong Facebook marketing strategy for your eCommerce business. Also, you can try to sell on Instagram to boost your reach as well. Check it out.

Content marketing for an online phone case business

Running ads for your phone case business is easy and quick, but costs money. That is why you need a long term and sustainable way to bring in customers to your online store. And, that is why you need to focus on content marketing.

Content marketing is best way to engage with your potential customers before they make a purchasing decision. Here is how it works for an online phone case business.

Many people buy a phone case as soon as they buy a new phone. So, your target should those who are planning to purchase a mobile phone in the near future. Now, what type of online content would they look for? They will search for phone comparisons, reviews, selection guides, and discount offers.

So, what you can do is, you can start writing blog posts or creating videos for the above topics. Then, you can promote your phone cases to the visitors those who are coming read and watch those content.

That is the basic outline of how to start a content marketing strategy for an online phone case business. Dig deeper, and find some other topics that your customers might be interested in.

Use influencer marketing to start a phone case business

I bet you already know what influencer marketing is. Have you seen Kardashians promote products on their Instagram profiles under sponsored tags? Yes, that is influencer marketing.

But, how the heck you can hire a Kardashian to promote your phone case business? Well, you don’t have to go that far to use influencer marketing. We will tell you a more simple and straightforward way to use influencer marketing for your phone case business.

A simple way to use influencer marketing

As a new business, don’t try to hire top tier influencers to promote your products. What you can do is, try to find a girl in your friend list with a lot of followers. Then, gift her with a free phone case and ask her to help you by promoting that phone case on her account.

Trust me; she will go overboard doing this. I always use this simple strategy to promote the products in my online stores. You don’t have to limit this process to one person. You can multiply this process by reaching different people on different networks. This strategy is similar to using influencer marketing but at the micro-level. I know that this strategy works better than any other method.

Are you ready to start a phone case business?

In this guide, we have discussed how to start a phone case business from scratch and how to sell phone cases online.

We have discussed how to select devices and phone case types to focus on your business. Then we have discussed how to find phone cases to sell, and how to design your own phone cases. Also, we have discussed where you can sell phone cases online. Then finally, we have talked about how to market your phone case business.

I genuinely believe that this article provides a comprehensive guide about how to start a phone case business.

So, what is next?