If you want to enter into the world of the fashion retail business, an e-commerce store is a must thing for you to have.
Why do you need an e-commerce website for selling your fashion products?
With the help of an e-commerce store, you get the below benefits:
- A wider range of audience for selling your fashion products.
- Ability to build a strong connection with your target audience.
- Ability to build a sustainable business platform at an affordable cost.
- An online store can be set up & run at a much affordable cost as compared to a brick-n-mortar business.
- A website enables you to advertise your business cost-effectively through several online marketing platforms such as Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising, etc.
With so many great benefits of having an e-commerce store, you must really consider hiring a web developer and creating a fashion store for your business.
And if you are on a budget, you can also hire Indian website builders to save on your web development cost.
But before you engage a website builder, you must know the basic yet essential features of a fashion e-commerce website.
In this blog post, we have shared 7 essential features that your fashion online store must have.
Let’s get started!
#1 Organised categories
With dozens of categories & sub-categories, the product listings on your e-commerce website can become overwhelming for the users to browse.
The more complicated your website structure is, the more difficult it becomes for your target audience to browse through and make their decision. In other words, a complicated structure on your website can affect your conversions badly.
It is, therefore, necessary to have an organised category structure on your website so that it becomes easier for your audience to find their desired products and purchase them.
So, do make sure that you always have appropriate & logical product categorization.
Not only that, but you also need to make sure that the mobile version of your website has the same structure and flow as your desktop website.
#2 Indication of surcharges
Trust & credibility are the two most important pillars of any successful e-commerce business. If your users don’t trust you or your website, they may not buy from you.
Transparency of costs is an essential ingredient of an e-commerce store.
Do you charge any additional costs such as shipping charges, taxes, etc.? If yes, you must make sure to disclose all of the additional charges on the products pages only.
Don’t surprise your online shoppers by showing them unexpected surcharges on the checkout page.
Various online studies have shown that unexpected hidden charges are amongst the major reasons for the high abandonment rate of an e-commerce website.
Don’t let this happen to you.
Make sure that your fashion e-commerce store doesn’t have any hidden charges such as:
- Shipping cost
- Taxes
- Insurance
- Convenience charges
#3 Guest checkout
If your fashion e-commerce store is forcing your users to create an account before they can purchase your products, you may be making a mistake. Perhaps you could be losing a huge amount of sales & customers for your business.
Let’s accept the fact that not everyone is willing to put in the time to signup for an account. Some of your online shoppers may just want to buy your products without creating an account with you.
You may be stopping your users to buy your products if you don’t allow them for guest checkout.
Guest checkout helps to lower down the abandonment rate of an online store. So, if you need more conversions & sales, allow your users to guest checkout.
Why you should allow your users to checkout as a guest?
- You get more conversions.
- Your e-commerce store gets a low order abandonment rate.
- It saves the time of your users.
- It enables your users to checkout hassle-free and makes their buying decision quickly.
Recommended post: 6 Effective ways to get more sales from mobile checkout
#4 Live chat
Do you want to build a successful fashion e-commerce store? Ask your website builder to integrate a live chat option with your website.
It’s very much likely that your website visitors may have a lot of questions & queries that they want to resolve before they can make a buying decision. They may have queries related to size change, size specifications, product warranty, etc.
Therefore, it would be very useful for your business to have a live chat option on your e-commerce store.
Below are some of the advantages of integrating a live chat module with your online store:
- A live chat makes it easier for users to get in touch with your experts.
- It helps you to get connected with your customers.
- It helps your potential buyers to resolve their queries and make their buying decision quickly.
- It shows that you are always available for your customers.
- You can also use the live chat option to up-sell your website visitors.
Recommended post: 9 Reasons to integrate a live chat feature with an eCommerce store
#5 Multi-Geo
Don’t let the geographical preferences of your potential customers become an obstacle to your growth. Especially if you want to cater to a global audience, you definitely need a solid e-commerce platform that supports multi-geographical preferences.
How can you make your fashion e-commerce store compatible with the different regions?
- By implementing a multi-currency feature with your website, you can allow your online shoppers to choose their preferred currency.
- By showing the content of your webpages according to the regional language of your potential customers.
Additionally, you can also request your website developer to leverage the IP detection technology so that your website users see the default currency & language according to their respective region/country.
#6 Image optimization
When you sell fashion items & accessories on your e-commerce website, you may have to upload multiple images for each product to show the different angles & closeups of your products.
In other words, each product on your e-commerce store may have 3-4 images and if you have 200 products on your website, you may have to upload 800 high-resolution images.
The overwhelming number of product images may cause your website to perform slow and as a result, it can affect the user experience and your overall revenue as well.
What’s the solution here?
Well, you can request your website builder to use an image optimization plugin to crunch all the high-resolution images, and that too without losing their quality.
#7 Mobile-friendliness
One of the major sources of getting traffic to your fashion online store could be social media platforms like Facebook & Twitter.
And various online studies have shown that the majority of social media audiences browse their feeds using a smart device such as a mobile phone or tablet. Having said that, it’s even crucial to have a responsive design for your e-commerce website.
Below are some of the major reasons for you to have a responsive e-commerce store:
- To get more conversions and sales.
- To reduce the bounce rate on your website.
- To enhance the user experience on your website.
- To cover a wider range of audiences especially from social media platforms.
Recommended post: What are the benefits of responsive website design
