Selling fashion is easy. Selling fashion online is another beast entirely.
The trouble with ecommerce fashion is the same trouble any highly experiential good faces when it goes digital: Nobody wants to buy it until they try it. While the total US fashion and apparel sector sits at $359 billion, a mere 17% of that $63 billion belongs to ecommerce.
Sadly, even after you manage to overcome the try-then-buy divide, making sure those purchases stay purchases is even more daunting. According to Shopify’s recently published report on the future of ecommerce fashion and apparel, The inability to physically interact with ecommerce items has resulted in an online return rate as high as 50% in some cases.
However, having an online store isn’t an excuse to shy away from creating rich and deeply personalized customer experiences. Here are 10 tips to get ahead of ecommerce and future-proof your online store.
1. Virtual fittings
First and foremost, would-be customers want to know that your clothing isn’t tight in all the wrong places. Old-school size guides are a confusing maze of measurements that most visitors simply ignore. Virtual fittings change all that. For instance, some online fitting room, allows shoppers to enter simple information about their body type -- height, age, weight, and body shape -- and then selects not just the size, but even specific products just for them.
2. Augmented reality
Right after fit, shoppers want to know, “How will it look?” And models aren’t enough.
They want to know, “How will it look on me?” Enter augmented reality. Outside of initial forays by the likes of XBox Kinect, full-scale AR is still a ways off.
However, for accessories, the future is now. Take Glasses.com. Its app gives users the ability to upload a photo of themselves and preview the entire inventory on their very own face. This creates a sense of ownership common in in-store buying but often lost in online.
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