Some unique requirements of a Fashion Ecommerce website

At flow20.com, we have over 4 years of experience creating user-friendly and stylish websites for clients involved in the fashion and apparel industry and although any website we design needs to be easy to use and Search Engine friendly at the very least, when it comes to development, its important to take into account the unique set of requirements that websites and E-Commerce solutions for fashion businesses have.

Product attributes

Product attributes refers to the various options that a single item is available in and Fashion E-Commerce websites have one of the highest count of options available when compared to many other online shops selling popular items.  At the very least, you would have size and perhaps colour.  However, it isn’t uncommon to find options such as length, fabric and fit in online stores selling bridal dresses or bespoke clothing.

Even if your businesses doesn’t sell fashion wear which warrants multiple product attributes, it still makes sense to ensure that your E-Commerce platform is fully scalable in case you wish to expand your product line in the future.

Cross selling opportunities

This is one area where online shops have a significant advantage over physical stores – the opportunity to cross sell and their conversion rates.  When implemented correctly, cross selling can help you increase your sales by 7-10% (or up to 35% of sales attributed to cross-selling, if you are Amazon!)

To achieve this, each time you add a product to your E-Commerce website, the system should allow you to manually select other related items and them display them alongside the main item. However,  with time, your website platform should be equipped to ‘learn’ the viewing habits of your online users so that the process of populating the ‘similar items’ for cross-selling can be automated thereby saving you time and work.

Zoom

Zoom on images has become a bare minimum for most E-Commerce websites. However, if you are selling clothes, especially on the higher-end,  a good quality zoom and preferably a ‘full screen’ option can help your website visitors take informed online decisions and increase your visitor to customer conversions.

Next has a great zoom feature which provides high-def images without compromising the page-load speed.

Whilst you may not see the zoom ‘plugin’ your Web Development company may use until the website coding has begun, it makes sense to insist on the highest quality of image zoom on your E-Commerce website.

Social Sharing

Although allowing users to share products with their friends should be a feature on every ecommerce website now,  Social sharing is especially effective for websites selling fashion wear.  Generally speaking,  a younger demographic and fashion-savvy consumers are also more likely to be active on the social web resulting in a greater likelihood of your clothes getting greater online exposure with the help of social sharing widgets such as AddThis.

You can use this to your advantage by making sure that your online shop’s Social Sharing function isn’t an afterthought and in fact, occupies a prominent position within the individual product pages. A good example of this is placing the “Share” button alongside the Buy button.

We hope this information helps make the process of getting your Fashion website design a little easier. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.