VTEX : 5 online fashion retail trends to boost sales

New technologies pop up every day with the goal of helping implement a business model, improving customer experience, connecting online and brick-and-mortar stores, and more. Still, sometimes it can be quite hard to separate what is merely a buzzword to a real and worth investing ecommerce trend.

Below are five of the main trends that have been noticeable and used with success by other big fashion companies inside the digital industry. Digital channels are extremely more connected and customers are getting more selective on their online purchases. How to make your online brand pop and your ecommerce sales grow? From convenience to delivery, customer service and others, it's all about enhancing brand experience.

1. Meet customers where they are

The key to understanding your customers lies in meeting them where they are. Understanding starts with listening, and there's no better way to listen than to put yourself in your customers' shoes, in the exact place they are digitally "standing."

Convenience

Meeting customers where they are doesn't necessarily mean you need to be in the same physical or digital space, but that your fashion ecommerce brand is also aligned with your clients' mindsets. Ask yourself how your target audience pays, what are their habits regarding the wait time for shipments, and if the checkout process is as seamless as possible.

Social tools

Using social media to connect with potential customers, expand brand presence, engage leads and, consequently, sell more is called social selling. It is not just a social media marketing strategy, but a new way of selling through a channel that has never been explored for selling, but for engaging.

Social selling is about building trust through organic product discovery and the force of the community voice that most social media platforms can harness. For instance, research has shown that when making shopping choices, 66% of consumers are more confident about making a purchase when a company is active on messaging apps.

Beyond these social tools, any type of interaction between customer and brand that happens in the digital world is a contributing factor for building an even better experience that is similar to the one happening in a brick-and-mortar store.

2. Invest in reverse logistics

Reverse logistics is a type of supply chain management that moves goods from customers back to the sellers or manufacturers. Reverse logistics can also include processes where the end consumer is responsible for the final disposal of the product, including recycling, refurbishing, or resale.

If there are too many steps between the process of receiving and trying to return or exchange a product can underwhelm customers in the final process of the funnel. This happens because of several reasons like a high return rate, an online or physical-only exchange policy, or even the hassle of going to a post office to ship the item back to the brand.

The importance of size guides and virtual trying rooms

Ordering an item from a website, paying for the shipping, waiting for the item to arrive and then realizing it is not the right size or that it just does not look good prevents many from buying from unknown brands. One way of solving this could be through personalization via technology. There are a lot of size guides available online and most of them are easily added to each product page on ecommerce websites.

There are a lot of ecommerce agencies that specialize in building size guides and measuring software in line with the production and the dimension tables of each specific product inside a website. Furthermore, there are some brands that use the dimensions of others for customers to have a reference. For instance, a customer can know which pants to buy at Zara through software that lets them know that the size is equal to one from H&M.

3. Care for your customer

Another big issue that most consumers dread is dealing with online clothing store customer service. They come to realize that picking up the phone may not always give them the immediate result they are seeking. Most often this puts off online purchases from unknown brands and people gravitate towards bigger brand websites even if it means paying more.

To solve this problem in your ecommerce clothing store, you could leverage social media as a customer service tool. Encourage your customers or site browsers to ask you questions via Twitter or Facebook. So instead of spending time on the phone or answering emails, your support team can easily answer most questions on social media.

4. Good deals for everyone

With strong promotions modules and various capabilities in combining and offering deals to customers, online stores can make themselves and their products more appealing to clients due to prices.

The end customer likes to feel like they had the best deal and benefit-cost from purchasing at your store. That is why it's so important to be able to offer flexible promotions that can change and adapt to what are the current needs of your brand. Feeling overstocked on polo shirts? Set up a "Buy One, Get One" promotion in just a few seconds.

In that way, you get more traffic and sales for your website while being able to take care of inventory and stock availability having a clear vision of what comes in and what comes out of your online store's stock.

5. Content is the future

A website with a good, well-structured content plan offers quality information for consumers, recommending products and/or services all while giving the ecommerce an opportunity to rank on search engines based on SEO structure.

By making use of artificial intelligence features, storytelling elements, attention-grabbing images and programming codes, brands can add the products they want to be featured and help customers add that to their shopping cart. This also helps in giving a new meaning to the ecommerce website, going beyond just a shopping hub, but somewhere where customers can actively look at interesting content without disrupting the buying experience.

Enhancing brand experience

Across the fashion industry, online retailers have been investing time and money to devlope their websites while rolling out strategies focused in improving user experience and customer journey. From social selling, to conversational commerce, live shopping and even NFT sales, these digital experts constantly reach out to their customers in an engagin way.

These new technologies welcome the possibilities of improving and innovating in every way possible. That is why major brands have already started investing in ways to dominate and transform all of these strategies into concrete and fruitful results.

DISCLAIMER: It is important to note that historical financial information or operational KPIs may not be comparable with publicly-filed information at SEC, since VTEX did not report its financials in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) prior to 2019 and certain KPI definitions may differ from publicly-filed information. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on figures published before July 21st, 2021 as they may not be comparable to the metrics disclosed from the IPO onwards.

Written byGabriela Porto

Gabi is a curiosity-driven journalist interested in telling great stories about the future of ecommerce, technology, innovation and everything related to this universe.