Is your fashion eCommerce store worthy of receiving credit cards?

Fashion is not a fad and eCommerce fashion stores are the holy grail of shopaholics as fashion is the middle name of humans. So, if you are into the fashion eCommerce biz you can certainly gain a lot, as the fashion season is never over. All you need to do is to learn what not to do while you are into fashion eCommerce business in order to save your self from the curse of shopping card abandonment.

1. Give a treat to your users, not make them retreat

After putting efforts for a certain period of time you tend to build a loop of loyal customers, which is much smaller than attracting new customers as shown in the figure given above. Moreover, according to Harward Business Review it takes 5 to 25 % more investment in attracting new customers than in maintaining the regular ones. What to do to retain your customers?

• First of all know why customer leave a service ?
• According to statistics:
• 20% leave due to poor customer service
• 55% backout a transaction to due poor service experience
• 35% loose their temper while talking to customer service reps
• 24% of them talk about their bad experience on social media thus hampering your growth
• And the reason being:
• Procrastination: 65% of the people leave if you keep on holding their services and keep on delaying it.
• Deception: Nowadays a lot of companies deceive people and do not deliver what they intend to.
• Rudeness: 77% of the customers leave due to the rudeness of the customer service agents
• Incompetency: 73% of the users get irked while dialing the customer service for the same reason time and again. Incompetency is never taken lightly.

If you deliver the best services to your customers on the very first go why will they go to your rivals. Apart from a good customer service experience customers also look for personalized coupons and discounts. This is my personal experience as an online shopper. I personally prefer to buy from an eCommerce website which offers the maximum discount. It is highly unlikely that after offering so much will make users go to another eCommerce store when they know they will get the best from your site.

2. Customer Support is must

I am not writing this blog for the heck of writing it but being a regular victim of poor eCommerce services i thought that this my responsibility to tell what all things irritate the users. I purchased some stuff from a very fancy looking eCommerce fashion store and due to certain reason i had to replace it. But whenever i tried to call the customer support the IVR used to answer “Thank you for call K****S, all our customer care executives are busy with other customers”. Whether i call them early in the morning, afternoon or in the evening they use to run the same voice recording. My next step will be to complain in the consumer forum. Moreover, in a Wall street journal report it was written that the a third of all the internet purchases are returned which makes it indispensable to have a good customer support.

3. Know what your customers want

If you want your customers to come back you need to know what they are searching for. In the pie chart shown below you can get to know what all activities do fashion eCommerce visitors do. What you need to do is to track their actions and then as per their requirements you need to draft a marketing strategy for the same. You can embark on an email marketing campaign which can send them personalized coupons or discounts and it holds the maximum share in the pie chart of 35.86%. With dedicated promotions your fashion eCommerce stores will not only become the hot favorite of the shopaholics but you will see a considerable increase in the returns on your investment.

4. Work on the psychology

Now comes the gimmick part or rather you can say that you should directly hit the psychology of the users. Good images are not ostentation in fashion industry but the need. In order to make you fashion eCommerce store work you need to have good images and thus apart from hiring a professional eCommerce developer you need to hire a photographer as well.

5. Mobility Matters

About 30 % of the customers abandon your app if it is not optimized for mobile devices. Moreover, the burgeoning mobile traffic is itself an alarm for all the eCommerce fashion stores to adhere to responsive web design which is the new design standard defined by Google. Apart from adopting responsive web design you can further architect your mobile app eCommerce store for providing a much better user experience to the users. As mobile phones are much handy, so users prefer to to browse more using mobile phones while traveling or during there spare time.

Shown below is a graph based on the results of questions asked to users who shop online.

I hope this might help you in delivering you fashion app with panache!

For related information and queries do drop your comments.

Author Bio: Claudia Johnson is a professional psd To responsive Magento theme conversion expert working with Magentax Ltd. She has delivered interesting write-ups on Magento development tips and tricks for novice and professional Magento developers.