Fashion eCommerce on Magento
Whether it is Shopify, WooCommerce or Magento Enterprise, choosing the best fit content management system is an integral part of every fashion eCommerce business.
With more than 200,000 installations, Magento remains the most trusted eCommerce platform in the world. From the sportswear giant Nike to the leading global electronic company Olympus, businesses of all sizes and types find Magento Enterprise and Community a suitable and scalable solution for their business.
The platform is also widely used for luxury fashion brands such as Paul Smith and Christian Louboutin. Despite the popularity, fashion brands still need to understand the benefits and drawbacks of using Magento platform to run their online businesses. The digital challenges facing fashion eCommerce sites are particularly unique, and therefore need to be addressed separately.
Benefits of using Magento for your fashion eCommerce store:
- Flexibility: An intuitive navigation and easy-to-follow page editor allows business owners to build and customise any part of their sites.
- Scalability: Magento supports up to 500,000 products on a single site, making it more scalable than its competitors. The ability to start small and expand the store make is popular for fast growing fashion startups.
- Open-source platform: Magento not only powers hundreds of thousands of online businesses across the world, but it is also supported by approximately 800,000 developers (with tons of useful extensions available from the Magento Connect Marketplace!).
- SEO: Advanced search engine optimisation capabilities ensure that your products can be effectively found in search, helping your business to increase your brand awareness and selling ability.
(See more information on Magento here.)
Challenges facing fashion eCommerce businesses
While Magento offers a variety of customisation option, building your own customisations can be overly complex for non-developers. For many fashion eCommerce sites, the balance between design, content and technology is the key to success.
Fashion brands that are heavily focused on design factors often overlook other important aspects such as user experience. While it is essential for high-end fashion brands to get the design right, it is also equally important to invest sufficient time and resource on developing a seamless and responsive interface.
Take a fashion eCommerce site with heavy animated content, for example – despite how impressive it may look, a slow-loading website tends to put off users, and will no doubt get penalised by Google search engine.
So here are some of the key points that we think will help your fashion eCommerce stand out:
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Mobile commerce
Today, the UK’s retail industry is losing estimated £6.6 billion per year as businesses fail to optimise their sites for mobile shoppers. Magento is one of the first platforms that recognised the potentials of mobile commerce and mobile eCommerce apps. More and more fashion brands will need to adapt their eCommerce sites to the distinctive needs of high-end consumers who are always on the move.
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eCommerce SEO
As competition gets fierce in the eCommerce market, savvy fashion brands will need to keep up with the constantly changing eCommerce SEO. Google’s algorithm has changed the way it ranks websites and eCommerce in mobile research, giving the preference to mobile friendly sites.
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Customer experience
Creating superb user experience requires more than just stunning imagery. Today, luxury and fashion eCommerce sites must go beyond its traditional approach to engage with luxury customers. Brands playing hard to get often find themselves lagging behind. On the other hand, brands who embrace the ‘behind the scene’ approach – whether via blog or social media integrated on their eCommerce sites – are much more ahead in the game.
Sleek and interactive fashion eCommerce design inspiration
So here are some leading fashion brands who are leveraging mobile commerce and user experience.
A clean and simple navigation of Harper Bazaar’s eCommerce site offers ultimate delightful shopping experience. A seamless transition from the online magazine, shop to purchase page allows the readers/shoppers to find the exact items they want in few clicks. But what makes this eCommerce really stand out is their little ‘Need Advice?’ feature on every product page, where you can get some help from a personal stylist.
Here’s another clean and simple fashion eCommerce built on Magento Enterprise, with a clear and consistent navigation layout. The careful use of imagery and content effectively conveys their high quality products.
In addition to its 100% mobile-friendly and innovative eCommerce design, Nicole Miller’s fashion eCommerce website optimises customer experience by tactfully embedding both product images and ‘behind the scenes’ content throughout the site.
Established in 1933, this quintessentially German fashion brand updated to Magento Enterprise to adjust to the changing needs of their consumers, offering optimised mobile commerce experience and supporting various payment methods (Find out more here). Each product landing page quickly shows each item size availability by simply hovering over the image.
A fashion eCommerce website reminiscent of Tumblr – Rebecca Minkoff is another cutting-edge brand who knows how to encompass its unique lifestyle essences effectively throughout its online store. What’s really helpful is the use of a sticky menu, where users can easily navigate to another page without having to scroll all the way back to the top.
What do you think?
From slick imagery to on-site user-generated content and seamless payment options, Magento is continuously evolving to become more than just a platform for users to browse and (hopefully) shop, but also to engage with the brand.
Want to get more insight into fashion eCommerce? Keep your eyes on our next week’s blog article on ‘25 Fashion eCommerce Sites that ooze luxury’!
Appnova is a digital agency specializing in web design, UX, eCommerce, branding, digital marketing and social media.
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