Fashion E-commerce trends are known for being ever-changing and fast-paced. Staying up to date on them is essential if you want to beat out the competition and maximize customer loyalty.
To help you prepare for the evolving fashion E-Commerce industry, Depict put together a comprehensive fashion E-commerce trends report for 2023. This report outlines the key shifts in consumer behavior and technological advancements that are expected to gain popularity in online fashion retail in 2023.
Want to get a sneak peek at what the full trend report contains? Below, we’ve picked a few points from the full E-book, to give you an idea of what to expect.
The first fashion E-commerce trend we’ve identified as essential to get to grips with in 2023 is hyper-personalization.
This may not be a surprising fashion E-commerce trend to see here. With the rise of hyper-personalization being felt everywhere online, from the addicting algorithm at TikTok, right the way down to online banking emails.
With the abundance of data available, businesses are now able to create tailored experiences for each and every customer, taking into account their unique needs and preferences. And, this is starting to be felt in fashion E-commerce too.
Personalized home pages, category pages, and product recommendations are becoming more and more prominent throughout the industry and play a huge role in building brand loyalty. As customers become more used to a personalized experience, failing to provide this is a surefire way to lose customers to businesses that provide a more unique experience.
As Malin Ericson from aim’n put it:
“Personalisation contributes to a higher order value. But it’s also about wanting to give our customers a great shopping experience, where we guide them and showcase outfits and the range.”
Malin Ericson, Conversion Rate Optimisation, aim’n
Read our full aim’n customer success story.
If you’re no longer giving your customers the online retail experience they want, or expect, you’re going to not only lose orders but lose customers too.
So, you now know that the importance of hyper-personalization cannot be overstated. But, how do you act on this fashion E-commerce trend?
There are several ways to implement hyper-personalization to your fashion E-commerce site, but Depict’s AI-led, fashion-trained personalization engine is by far the easiest and fastest. Integrating a personalization engine into your current E-commerce store will mean no major development work is needed, and there’s no manual work involved in personalizing your shoppers’ experiences.
Picking a fashion-trained personalization engine, like Depict’s product, is essential as the visual-AI recognizes patterns and subtle similarities between the products your customer is interested in. This results in a personalized experience that is as spot-on as a real in-store employee making recommendations.
This is a trend that is bound to be felt right across the industry, thanks to the particularly turbulent E-commerce markets we’re seeing. Shopify estimates that it costs on average $129 for a fashion business to acquire a new customer. Therefore, if your AOV falls below this, you’re not going to regain your acquisition costs on a shopper’s first order.
While the hyper-personalization trends we mentioned above help to improve AOV, therefore quickly regaining acquisition cost, it’s also important to look at a customer’s lifetime value.
With inflation rising, acquiring new customers may get more difficult (and more expensive), so retention and customer loyalty are key to beating the market. You’ll be pleased to hear, this doesn’t just mean lowering your prices. In fact, as Victor Emilson, CEO of ROIROI, put it.
“The most successful DTC brands I know of and work with, rarely give discounts and don’t have outspoken loyalty programs - but still have the most loyal and engaged customers. That says something about how loyalty actually works, it’s not tied to discounts, rewards or points - it’s tied to a feeling of belonging to something more than just products or transactions.”
One of the best ways to start working on customer loyalty and retention is to offer an excellent user experience. Ensuring your site is fast, professional, and efficient to use can help to bring down bounce rate and to keep customers with you rather than pushing them towards competitors.
But, building customer loyalty also means offering a personalized experience, and being there for the customer at every step of their shopping journey, across every channel.
Answering social comments, customer service requests, and any other communication in a timely and friendly manner plays a huge role in building customer loyalty. You should also be sure that your brand has consistent messaging across each channel too, as this helps in building your image in a customer's mind.
By focusing on providing a positive and unique shopping experience, your fashion E-commerce brand can cultivate a loyal customer base that will continue to support and even recommend the brand to others during difficult times.
As we’ve already mentioned, fashion E-commerce is constantly evolving. That means to stay on top of your game, your business needs to evolve too.
Trying out experimental E-commerce is an exciting opportunity to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. Xiaofeng Wang, Principal Analyst at Forrester, put it this way:
“In general, luxury brands that are able to leverage digital technologies to increase customer engagement and shopping experience performed well … these tactics include virtual shopping experiences, live streaming, and social retail.”
If you’ve got the budget, live streaming, and social experiences are excellent ways to generate hype. But, if you want to start smaller, there are solutions for that too. For example, plenty of brands have experimented with creating Instagram or Snapchat filters, which is a small move towards experimental E-commerce and can attract a whole different type of audience that you may not have reached before.
Another great benefit of experimenting with E-commerce in this way is that it can often lead to a rise in your user-generated content. Whether this is from getting your customers talking about you on social media, or snapping a picture with a filter you’ve made.
Of course, experimental E-commerce can also mean simply experimenting with your existing site layout or social media offering. For example, if you’re not already doing so an even simpler, faster step in a more experimental direction could be personalized home or product pages. Or, working with fashion influencers on giveaways. You can then A/B test your changes, and start experimenting based on the data you get.
Found these trends helpful and want to go into more detail on how they’re already emerging in the industry? Or, perhaps you want to know even more fashion E-commerce trends to expect in 2023?
Well, you can access all of that information and more in our full fashion E-commerce 2023 trend report. Simply click this link to download the report, and find out more about your industry and how its changing.
