Planning the implementation a Fashion eCommerce site

• What makes a fashion e-commerce website a successful?
• What are the competitive factors online vs physical retail?
• How is an e-commerce team organised? What roles are necessary?
• What are the key success factors for fashion e-commerce? What are the activities that generates value? What can be done in house and what do we need to outsource?
• What does a company need to implement a successful e-commerce?
• and in part different (Business Model, Technology, Innovation, Competitive intelligence, user experience, logistics).

Ecommerce overview

A successful e-commerce business it’s the result of several components combined to create a system that provides the customers with a satisfactory shopping experience and the owner with a profitable and scalable channel.

Here below these components:

• Strategy & Business Model
• Organisation: People & Processes
• E-commerce technology
• Logistics & Shipping services
• Customer & User experience
• Digital Marketing & CRM

To be successful a website has to be easy to use – user friendly – and to be graphically appealing to your customers,  the ecommerce website needs to be fast so your clients won’t have to wait a long time for the pages to load. Site speed  is Speed is becoming more and more important both for the success of an ecommerce,  because of the customers – as their expectations keep rising and  in terms of digital marketing because google will reward the websites that are faster to load by giving them a higher position in the SERP Search Engine Result Page. You also need to make sure that the product you offer, or the collection of products, are suitable and sufficient to satisfy the needs and expectations of your clients.  Finally you need to offer your clients and all other visitors of your website promotions and other commercial benefits so they will also find an advantage to buy on your website. 

Online store essential elements:

1. Graphic aspect: appealing, modern, in line with customers attitude and positioning
2. Site speed: fast website to avoid abandonment due to slow load time
3. Product offer: relevant and extensive to meet customer expectations
4. Promotions: to incentivise customers to buy on your website

How do we create a website that is graphically appealing modern fresh looking and very easy to use.

web design for e-commerce is not as much a matter of creativity as such,  but it’s more the resultant of good organisation of information,  well done quality images,  proper use of text in titles headings and paragraphs to make constant legible and finally Leigh-Anne good organisation of all these elements within the page and and in relation to themselves creating the right links from one page to the next.

 e-commerce design is more about allowing customers to find what they are looking for easily and and to allow them to browse and look at as many products as possible as if they wear in a commercial centre or shop.

customers of department stores where to find what they’re looking for or or they can use the signs that are available near the entrance of a store or near the elevators and stairs that indicates where to find specific brands and product categories.

 the same happens online,  so when we are building and only store we have to think of the functionality the user experience and how the customer will find the product we are selling.

Product catalogues are usually organised in taxonomies,  at economy is that your article organisation of product information,  from top category down to the single item.  are ready to wear company could organise their taxonomy in men and women and children and then, for age of this item there will be a number of second level categories like dresses jackets tops shirts shoes and other accessories,  within dresses there could be long dresses short dresses long sleeves dresses and short sleeves dresses,  underneath jackets category there could be leather jackets nylon jackets, Parkers,  bombers and so on. 

After deciding which products to put on sale on our website, and how to organize them into categories we need now to digitize them which means to transform them from physical products. Ecommerce professionals say that ‘we don’t sell products online, we sell images’.  I’d like to add that we sell images with the help of descriptions. In order to represent correctly a product online,  and in order to provide the customers with the correct amount of information that they need to make their choice and to order the right product online,  we need to provide the users of our website with a set of information that is quite extensive.  

Here below is a list of information that you need to provide to your users if you’re selling fashion items online:

1. Photos of your product: up to 10 photos;
2. Description of the fabric and material of the product;
3.  Description of the fit of the product;
4.  description of the size of the product and conversion table
5.  editorial description or emotional description of the product
6.  washing and care instructions
7.  information about returning the product in case is not suitable
8.  cost of shipping and time of delivery 
9. Translations
10.  optional video
11.  optional images from social network and other uses
12.  optional reviews of the product by other customers.

Once you are done creating all the information, you’ll need to collect it all and upload it onto an e-commerce platform.  Usually, before uploading the product descriptions and assets onto the ecommerce platform, these pieces of information are collected into a system that specialises in the management of images and descriptions. 

These systems are usually called PIM which stands for Product Information Management system or DAM which stands for Digital Asset Management Systems. These systems allow many people to collaborate from different departments inside and outside of the company to collaborate towards the creation of the full set of product information, these systems will also transfer the assets and product data to the commerce platform for publication on the website. 

TRAFFIC ACQUISITION

The success of a fashion ecommerce depends also on the ability to generate traffic on the website. It could be that your brand is already famous and people will just search for your name on Google and find your website on search engines,  but if your brand is not yet famous or if you are a retailer, and you sell products from several brands, you will need to invest in digital marketing activities to drive traffic to your store.

There are several tools that you can use to drive traffic to your store, we usually refer to them as communication channels or simply channels,  let’s see some examples here below:

• Paid search,  which means buying keywords on Google or other search engines which will display adverts on the search engine result page.
• Organic traffic,  traffic generally coming from search engines but not paid for,  this marketing area is also referred to as search engine optimisation SEO
• Direct email Marketing DM,  which consists of sending newsletters via email to the customers and prospects register on your database
•  organic social and paid social,  this is the traffic coming to your website from social networks like Facebook and Instagram,  it can either be coming from posts or from paid ads. 

The above definitions are also reflected in the reporting tool that we will use to track and measure the results of the digital marketing activities. To track campaigns, measure them and evaluate the return on investment ROI of the marketing activities we will use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a reporting tool made available by Google, it’s free to use, and it is one of the most widely adopted web Analytics platforms by fashion companies and e-commerce businesses throughout the world.