eCommerce Fashion Industry Trends for Your Brand Growth

Fashion sets up its rules even in our way of living. We live in the era of flourishing an eCommerce fashion business when you can buy products online from any place and at any time. Now the most influential fashion brands aim to keep up with the times and provide not only offline but also an excellent digital experience.

What Drives eCommerce in Fashion Industry

Fashion shoppers expect to be seduced by the beauty of your website and collections. That’s why retailers stir emotions with stunning high-quality and high-resolution visuals. Design, usability, content, and customization all require significant attention for your store to deliver a rich, immersive, and intuitive online experience.

Fashion Industry Trends that Play Digitally

Fashion eCommerce has specific finer points to it. There are certain factors that online store owners have to put into perspective to ensure success.

Sustainability

With the recent attention given to the environment, sustainability is one of the new-age fashion industry trends. eCommerce fashion industry analysis shows that a customer develops more trust and loyalty for a brand that is making the extra effort in terms of sustainability.

Whether encouraging recycling or environmental-friendly disposal in the manufacturing process, sustainability is always a plus. For instance, fashion giants Adidas recently received many plaudits (and new shoppers too) for their efforts in making 100% recycled shoes.

Online Visibility

A quick look at eCommerce fashion industry trends shows that online visibility is a trend that is key to sales performance. According to Brandwatch, over the last quarter of 2019, brands like Nike, Hermes, and Gucci were the top performers in web visibility, search visibility, and follower growth.

These brands spend a lot of money on advertising and marketing. However, what sets them apart is their influencer marketing nous and picking the right influencer. For instance, Lebron James is a Nike influencer and ambassador. His 69 million followers on Instagram means when he collaborates with Nike on ads, the world listens!

Functionality

Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce are just a few of the tools that eCommerce fashion brands can use to take their business online. With the COVID situation, online apparel sales statistics show that more brands are doing that. Besides creating functional products and comfort-focused clothes and footwear, brands pay attention to the functionality of their online experience.

Store owners have to make sure their eCommerce platform offers maximum functionality. From separate, specific categories for different products to customizing the purchase experience, functionality is now the new order of the day.

eCommerce Fashion Industry Analysis

When each country had to limit physical interactions during a new time, online shopping is one of the essential options to buy and deliver most of the goods.

According to Statista, the number of digital buyers expected in 2021 will reach 2.14 billion. People buy more things from online stores as it is transmitted as a safer and pretty much possible option nowadays. Fashion products, such as clothes, footwear, or accessories, are also not an exception. Let’s see the numbers about the fashion industry in different countries.

The UK

We can see that the fashion industry in the UK takes the majority of eCommerce businesses.

eCommerce industry growth in the UK by Statista

Sweden

Another fast-growing and economically stable country, Sweden, is showing the constant growth of the eCommerce industry market and its revenue.

eCommerce industry growth in Sweden by Statista

The same goes for other Scandinavian countries, such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, and the USA. The fashion market grows online and becomes one of the most promising eCommerce industries.

What eCommerce Fashion Trends Customers Set

The key to our clients’ heart is somewhere where their wishes are. When creating our offerings, we should start with what our customers want. People mostly buy products because they want them (and not because they need them). They choose emotionally – that’s a significant difference! We want to feel an emotional connection with a brand. We buy the experience. It’s not an easy task for brands to create such relationships with customers. However, let’s see some practical things that work in eCommerce and that address the customers’ wants.

So what online customers want?

• Shop fast

We all lack the time. We want to spend time on our family, friends, self-development, career, sports, and it’s only the beginning of our wishlist! Numerous choices surround us every minute. That’s why we all want to choose quickly and save our energy for other tasks. If your website can provide a quick way of shopping, you’ll be ahead of your competitors.

• Feel care

Most people respond to empathy. They want to know that the eCommerce fashion brands they are buying from care. In a nutshell, they want to feel like it’s not just about the money. To show care, brands can offer bonuses, guides for using products, and a smoother shopping experience. It may be a simple discount offering or gift cards. Gestures like this go a long way in building customer loyalty.

• Build trust

In the eCommerce fashion industry, the relationship between different brands and their customers must be based on trust. Companies invest in building their brands, earning positive customer reviews, and aim to build trust. Are your payment gateways secure? Do you offer a money-back guarantee on returned goods? Furthermore, can shoppers rest assured in the quality of your products? With trust comes a willingness to patronize your business and even tell others about it.

All these wishes are quite usual, right? And in most cases, they are about all of us.

We should remember that not brands set trends, but their clients want the highest quality services and tend to have an emotional connection with brands. That’s why they (and we all) set new trends in eCommerce. Let’s look at the most important and practical of them.

Immediate Page Loading

According to Google, the page must load content not slower than for 2 seconds on desktop devices, and 1 sec – on mobile phones and tablets in your target locations where you sell the products. The faster the website is, the higher chances are that the visitor will prefer your brand to your competitors. It’s a proven fact that conversions directly depend on page loading speed.

Some useful tools can help you to check and grow the website speed:

• Pingdom measures the website speed from various locations, shows page speed results in second, and gives you some useful recommendations.
• Google Speed Insights shows you what Google thinks about your website and how it evaluates your speed score. You’ll see the results in points and some useful advice on how to improve it.

Fewer Texts More Visuals

Tones of information are bombing people continuously. We all are a bit tired of this. When creating your offerings, try to focus on the key message you want to express and show it! So, it’s better to show than tell. We all like to watch short videos and see creative examples rather than read a long text.

Visualize your products and create a feeling of natural interaction. This way, you’ll help the customer better understand your offering and decide whether this particular product fits their needs. You can do it with high-quality images and multiple product views, or ‘shop the look’ features (see more about useful features for the online fashion store).

Voice Search Right on the Go

First on the list of eCommerce website fashion trends is voice search. Simply put, voice search is more effective compared to typing. Mathematically, the average person can type at a speed of 35 words per minute. With voice search, it is possible to input up to 100 words in a minute.

Having voice search available means customers can quickly find products with minimum stress. They don’t even have to sit at a keyboard before shopping. They can shop while cooking, doing the dishes, or driving. This level of accessibility can boost sales performance and, consequently, revenue.

An example of this is liquor giants Johnny Walker’s voice search features. Via discussions held with Amazon Alexa, the brand can suggest products and help make shopping decisions.

Johnny Walker’s voice search feature

Helpful ChatBots for a Quick Talk

Another notable eCommerce fashion website trend is chatbots. 73% of people will buy more in response to top-notch customer support. In the world of online customer service, there’s nothing faster than a live chat session.

Chatbots are helpful tools to personalize the shopping experience. Their ability to collect personal data means they are also a handy marketing automation tool. Finally, they help provide customers with quick support and save them time.

H&M’s chatbot

Here’s how clothing giants H&M does it. They created a chatbot that quizzes customers on their style options. Furthermore, it can provide photo styles for customers to choose from. This chatbot designs a unique fashion profile that it uses to help each customer make a purchase.

Mobile Purchase from Anywhere

Payment is a challenge for many people trying to patronize eCommerce fashion brands. As a result, the latest trend is to make the process easier for shoppers to make payments from anywhere with their phones. A great way to do this is by offering the ability to save their credit card information securely.

Offering mobile-accessible payment options is another route. They can include PayPal, MasterCard, MasterPass, or Google Wallet. According to Practical eCommerce, offering alternative payment options for mobile users can increase conversion rates by up to 101%. What is fashion eCommerce, if not the ability of customers to purchase fashion products and make payments easily?

Personalized User Experience

Personalizing the shopping experience for each customer includes providing custom offers and recommendations based on previous user activity, demographics, and personal data. Also, you can add features that allow customers to create unique and customizable products. With personalization, more is always best.

A quick look at most customers’ shopping behavior shows that they value brands that make the experience as personalized as possible. A good example is the ASOS site personalization feature. Whenever customers visit the website, it immediately redirects to a gender-specific product section based on previous visits.

ASOS personalization

AR to Try On Your Products

The excellent way to showcase your brand offerings is to demonstrate your products with interactive 3D models or even augmented reality. Many famous brands, such as IKEA, Lacoste, Converse, and more, use this technology and create a life-like experience for their online customers.

IKEA’s augmented reality app

This way, the customers can genuinely tell the difference and understand how your products look and work in action.

Who knows, maybe you’ll be the next one? 🙂

Free Shipping as a Bonus

The cost of shipping tends to discourage most shoppers. For one, customers prefer a uniform pricing model. Due to this, free shipping is fast becoming an eCommerce fashion website trend. Furthermore, when used strategically, it can be an advantage over the competition.

Ensuring that the price stays constant from product to checkout is a plus for online store owners. A great way to do this is to factor shipping costs into the pricing of each product.

To take advantage of free shipping as a bonus, make it prominent on every page. More importantly, highlight it on every product page.

Various Payment Options

To gain the extra edge over competitors, eCommerce fashion brands offer multiple payment options. This is key to ensuring that the customer doesn’t abandon their cart at the checkout page. Paymill’s statistics show that up to 50% of prospective customers stop shopping if their regular payment option isn’t available. Therefore, it’s essential to provide customers with payment channels that they are comfortable with.

For context, if a customer is used to paying for services with Amazon Pay, they will be more likely to shop with brands that offer this payment option. eCommerce fashion trends show that most brands offer payment options that include but are not limited to the following:

• Bank transfers
• Ewallets
• Direct Deposit
• Mobile Payments
• PayPal
• Credit Cards

Omnichannel Experience

In terms of customer accessibility, the omnichannel experience involves providing shoppers with a smooth shopping experience regardless of the website platform. Whether via mobile or desktop, customers should be able to pick up and continue shopping from where they left.

The omnichannel experience involves connecting offline and online shopping experiences. For illustration, a buyer should find it easy to research products online and make purchases offline. Experts also refer to this trend as Research Online, Purchase Offline (ROPO). It allows the customers to get great info before deciding to buy.

Another example of the omnichannel experience is the click-and-collect feature. In this case, the customer orders products online and picks them up at a physical outlet.

The omnichannel experience also extends to customer support. For instance, with access to customers’ details, a support representative online should be able to proffer solutions and make spot-on recommendations just as easy as a support staff communicating via phone call. This eCommerce fashion trend makes the purchase process seem uniform regardless of how it’s accessed.

Excellent Customer Service

Fashion industry trends show a strong focus on providing excellent customer service. This includes assisting customers at every stage of the buying process, from helping with product decisions to resolving technical and payment issues, customer support cuts across the board.

This trend contributes to user experience. It can influence the level of loyalty and trust that a customer has in a brand. 95% of buyers say that excellent customer support determines how loyal they are to a brand. Self-service options, quick response times, and personalized support are some of the tenets of excellent customer support.

Genuine Client Reviews

Customers take reviews very seriously in the world of fashion eCommerce. Up to 50% of prospective buyers check out reviews and ratings before looking at products.

Therefore, it is crucial for eCommerce fashion brands to prioritize genuine client reviews on their websites or trustworthy platforms, such as Trustpilot, Google, or Facebook. Most brands include genuine reviews and ratings on their homepages and collect the reviews on Trustpilot. Look at ASOS, For example. They have over 40,000 positive reviews!

You can also go the Yours Clothing route and set aside a particular page for reviews and testimonials.

Yours Clothing customer reviews

Trustworthy Brand Purpose

Fashion brands need to be more than just a company that sells fashion essentials in today’s digital world. Part of building an authentic brand purpose is taking steps to make the idea of buying from a company more desirable.

When offering customers a vision or a unique goal, products obtain a new meaning. It’s all about providing a purpose that reflects values that target customers will love.

An excellent example of a brand taking such efforts is Nike. The global dominance of this brand is a function of its brand image — excellence, determination, and self-awareness. Customers appreciate these values, and it keeps Nike at the top of the sales and visibility rankings. They help customers believe in themselves and ensure that all of us are the athletes, no matter what. Their purpose of inspiring athletes allows millions of people to change their lives for the better and achieve results turning Nike sneakers from just footwear to a secret power. And Nike is not the only purpose-driven brand. Now brands compete not only with each other but with the whole philosophies and beliefs!

Nike’s brand purpose

How eCommerce Fashion Brands React

eCommerce fashion brands are finding innovative ways to respond to industry trends. Some of the responses geared toward boosting brand image and sales include:

Create Sustainable Fashion with Care

Creating sustainable fashion means manufacturing products and fashion essentials with one eye on the future. This means doing it without impacting the ability of future generations to carry out such activities. The starting point for most eCommerce fashion brands is ensuring the sustainability of natural resources. However, they also focus on preserving social as well as economic resources.

Clothing brand Filippa K is an excellent example of this trend. They use a conscious design for all products. Filippa K uses sustainable raw materials and offers complete transparency.

Filippa K about sustainability

Save Resources with Re-Commerce

Also called reverse commerce, this strategy involves re-purposing, renting, or reselling items that have been used in the past. General shopping platforms such as Craigslist and eBay have used this technique in the past. However, the growing usage of the “Upscale Resale” trend means that more and more eCommerce fashion brands are using re-commerce.

Today, the global re-commerce market is about $20 billion and should double in size over the next two years. Furthermore, half of this is attributed to fashion brands. A popular re-commerce strategy that fashion brands can use is renting methodology. eCommerce fashion brands can rent already-worn clothes out to people at affordable prices. Another approach is to buy used fashion products from customers, exchanging them for gift cards and store credits.

There’s also the option of turning used materials into new products. For instance, The Renewal Workshop collects discarded clothing and repurposes them, creating new clothing. Applications like Depop allow users to buy and sell old clothing.

Make a Difference with Brand Manifests

In reaction to fashion industry trends, brands are taking extra steps to make a difference in society. These kinds of actions are a manifest that shows prospective customers that the businesses offer meaning and societal value in addition to quality products.

Customers are quick to identify with fashion brands that display values that they uphold. Furthermore, it can be a critical tool for building brand trust and loyalty. Brand manifests can include anything from giving to local charity organizations to participating in relief efforts. Take a look at how footwear giants Toms UK are making a significant difference with brand manifests.

How Toms makes a difference

Engage Customers with Authentic Websites

What is fashion eCommerce? At base value, it’s the ability to purchase fashion products from anywhere in the world using digital tech installed on websites. As a result, engaging customers with authentic, functional websites is key to boosting customer experience and keeping up with fashion industry trends.

There are different ways to make a website seem authentic to the average buyer. For starters, blog posts are a great way to share ideas with customers. Secondly, a simple, neat design should align with brand image and vision while remaining functional is encouraged. Finally, in terms of product catalogs, use sharp, clear pictures and content that emphasize the quality of your products. Vevie is an excellent example of an authentic website.

Vevie fashion online store

What Fashion Website Trends to Follow

There are many useful eCommerce trends that you may find online. They are breathtaking designs, various product customizers, social media features, voice search, and cool mobile interfaces that all have a goal to provide a high-level life-like shopping experience.

Wait a minute!

How exactly can you use all these trends correctly on your website to increase your conversion and customer loyalty?

We understand how it’s challenging to create a great shopping experience and your eCommerce website from scratch. That’s why we’ve got you covered, and collected trends, useful tips, and examples that will help your store sell successfully. These are the basics.

Fashion Website Design That Strikes

Website design creates the first and the lasting impression about your website, and also about your brand. It should work from both sides: be beautiful to evoke positive emotions, and help the customer shop quickly and easily. There are plenty of works that we can find for our inspiration. And taking some great examples from your business niche is a good idea to understand what you like, what your customers need, and collect some references. We suggest you visit the following websites for inspiration and picking up the ideas:

• Awwwards: eCommerce Design
• Behance: Fashion Web Design
• Shopify Themes: Clothing & Fashion
• Themeforest: Shopify Fashion Themes, Magento Fashion Themes

And also, don’t forget to check out our complete guide on eCommerce web design 2020.

Fashion Website Features That Involve

Before you go for the inspiration and stick to awesome websites of talented designers, stop for a while. Design is an emotional thing but also functional. Each feature, image, and button has a purpose and leads the customer to their shopping point – purchase.

Look at the list of user-friendly features that will help you understand the purpose of design elements and make a modern fashion store convenient, intuitive, and attractive for customers.

And finally, think about your business strategy and plan to launch your successful fashion brand online. We are always glad to help you grow your eCommerce fashion brand or just give some useful advice to take off! Thank you for reading and staying with us.