Fashion is all about the first impression.

• Boosting confidence on a first date
• at a job interview
• or just in your daily life.

It communicates who you are and how you want others to perceive you.

If you run a fashion ecommerce business, the same is true … only more so. Even trickier, every touchpoint along your customer’s journey gives visitors a new first impression:

• Attracting visitors with your advertising
• Enticing them to and through your product pages
• Delighting them with a fast, easy, and stylish user experience

And those positive or negative first brand impressions can have a lasting impact on your fashion ecommerce conversion rates and customer retention.

Here are 11 strategies to improve your fashion ecommerce conversion rates:

• Benchmark Your Conversion Rates
• Optimize for Mobile-First Experiences
• Improve Site Performance and Speed
• Invest in High-Quality Photos and Copy
• Generate Honest Ratings and Reviews
• Refine Your Site Search Functionality
• Implement Scripts to Automate Sales and Pricing
• Get Creative with Free Shipping Offers
• Upsell to Increase Average Order Values
• Customize Checkout Experiences
• Enable Customers to Buy on Any Platform

I’ll include a few interesting details here. For full details on each strategy, see the article linked at the bottom.

Conversion rate optimization isn’t about optimizing web pages – it’s about optimizing decisions – and the page itself is a means to an end.

CRO involves ongoing, incremental site improvements to get new customers to buy, or take other actions that your company defines as a “conversion” (e.g., email newsletter sign-ups, or creating a new account with your site).

Fashion CRO is both an art and a science which requires merchants to continuously test and optimize their customer’s first impressions about their website design, usability, product information and more – while adapting to consumer behaviors and preferences over time.

Below are changes you can make to your site today to increase the fashion conversion rate odds in your favor – keeping in mind that these are just tips to get you started.

Benchmark Your Conversion Rates

Overall, worldwide revenue is expected to increase from $481.2 billion in 2018 to $712.9 billion by 2022:

Fashion conversion rates by device and location:

Fashion average order value:

Improve Site Performance and Speed

Slow speed kills your conversion rates. It should be your step 0. What’s the use of having a well-optimized site if your users are going to abandon before they even have a chance to see it?

Slow pages are the number one issue that irate mobile users complain about — ranking even higher than site crashes

There are many ways to reduce the page load time on your fashion ecommerce site, including:

• Compressing and reducing image file sizes
• “Minifying” or improving poor coding of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS on your site
• Leveraging a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Create High-Quality Photos and Copy

Fashion ecommerce is a highly visual and emotional medium. According to Kissmetrics, “93% of consumers place visual appearance and color above other factors when shopping.”

Considering that people can’t touch or try on your products online, you need to work twice as hard to make your products come alive via excellent photography and graphics.

For Peepers (above), the image and product description quality improvements contributed to a 30% increase in conversions.

Generate Honest Ratings and Reviews

Ratings and reviews are other elements of your fashion ecommerce product pages that can help you close the deal with a customer. They don’t always need to be positive, either.

Even negative online reviews can be helpful, as retailers that display online reviews see conversion rates rise by as much as 270 percent, with higher-priced and higher-consideration items benefiting more.

Customers can perceive your site to be more credible if you include negative feedback or ratings.

Purchase likelihood peaks for products with average ratings between 4.0 and 4.7 on a five-star ratings system, with those closer to 5.0 viewed with skepticism as being ‘too good to be true.’

Refine Your Site Search Functionality

Customers who use site search are almost 2X more likely to convert on your site and can generate upwards of 40% of your site’s revenue.

So really work on it. Every time I worked with ecommerce businesses on improving their search results, it always resulted in a win. Always.

Conclusion

Speed. Visual perfection. Simplicity. Trust. Constant, ongoing optimization process. Win!

Improving Fashion Ecommerce Conversion Rates: 11 Strategies

PS. Besides all of the above, put a lot of time into product descriptions. They can make a huge difference. It’s one of the most often overlooked elements in ecommerce.