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Top Tips For Successful Fashion Ecommerce

Oli Kashti - Writer and Fact-Checker for Fast Simon
By Oli Kashti
Joel Taylor - Editor for Fast Simon
Edited by Joel Taylor

Published October 17, 2024.

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The fashion industry dominates the eCommerce world, with the largest B2C market around. With the high levels of engagement, comes competition. Holistic marketing strategies as well as a highly functional website are essential in order for fashion brands to stand out from the crowd, and make their mark on the saturated scene. 

Challenges For Fashion Ecommerce Brands

Challenges that fashion brands might encounter are:

  • Easily bored customers: require fast and effective engagement. In the age of social media, the attention span of shoppers is shorter than ever.
  • Highly competitive market: huge brands dominate the fashion industry, it can be a challenge for smaller brands to hold their own against this.
  • Trust: creating the same level of brand and product trust as customers get in brick-and-mortar stores is all down to merchandising and marketing. 
  • Higher costs: it can be hard for businesses to grow with costs rising and customers reluctant to spend more- this is where marketing steps in.
  • Search: using an advanced site search is crucial in order to offer a superior eCommerce experience.

How we’ve taken a look at the challenges, let’s take a look at some strategies that can counter these problems.

Use Engaging Content

In order to make sure your customers don’t get bored, don’t let them! Keep your content dynamic and interesting. Use banners and promo tiles that announce your deals, and let your customers know why shopping with you is a good idea. These pop-ups could offer discount codes, or special deals that keep the customers feeling valued.

Dynamic content in general is a great way to ensure that shoppers stay engaged. Why not consider using videos as social proof, or other dynamic visual stimulation to capture imaginations.

Of course, this engaging content should not be overdone, and all of the content should be high quality. Make sure the overall visual quality of your website remains high, and the intensity of this dynamic content is not off-putting to shoppers.

Email Marketing

Email and SMS marketing are a great way of ensuring customer retention. Cart abandonment is a huge problem within eCommerce, with as many as 70% of customers sometimes abandoning cart before finalizing their purchase. 

One key to this is ensuring that the buying funnel is smooth and frictionless so shoppers easily make the purchase before having time to change their mind. Another key element to focus on is customer retention. 

Storing customer information and reaching out to them when they have abandoned their carts is a great way of retaining customers. An email or SMS that says “Don’t Forget To Complete Your Purchase” can help secure the sale. Offering a discount if they also complete their purchase can be a great way to incentivize them.

In order to achieve this well, make sure that you use an email or SMS marketing system such as Klaviyo or Attentive who specialize in highest quality outreach. Optimizing this kind of outreach will specialize in retention, and provide the best possible marketing.

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Use Social Media

If social media isn’t a part of your marketing strategy, it’s time to get on board. Influencer marketing, user generated content and engaging content via platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest are all huge players. These can all accelerate your marketing success incredibly effectively.

Some of the benefits of using social media are:

  • Cost-effectivity
  • Heightened brand awareness
  • Fostering sense of community
  • Clear brand representation
  • Increased web traffic

You should make sure that you offer a holistic approach across all of the channels of your brand. Social media is included here. Social media can offer engaging and fast moving entertainment and instant pathways to purchase. This is especially true if there is the potential for social commerce, where purchases are made within the social media app. 

This level of speed, and effectiveness should be continued on your web store. As well as any brand themes, colors and values that are presented in one area. 

AI-Powered Solution

Lastly, in order to make sure your fashion brand stands out from the crowd, it’s important to power your site with the latest AI eCommerce technology. In terms of search, an AI powered site search can optimize your overall site to offer a superior experience.

A site search that includes vector search or multimodal search can understand shoppers intent without relying on keywords. Natural language processing as well as synonym and antonym understanding means that shoppers will always find results, no matter the way they search.

A search that involves high quality images, as well as personalized recommendations also means that shoppers receive an optimal experience. For high intent shoppers, the way that a site search operates is very important. 

In order to stand out from the crowd when it comes to fashion eCommerce, you have to put in the effort. There are already so many fashion eCommerce giants on the market who have set the standard that shoppers are expecting. This is not impossible to meet, but it does require some planning and following the advice set forward in this post.