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Ladies enjoy shopping but how do they feel about shopping for fashion online? Every woman deserves a good shopping spree so how can retailers improve the consumer experience online.
When purchasing clothes online you can never guarantee the fit or suit on the individual. The online fashion market is worth 4.27 billion in 2009 and is predicted to increase significantly between 2010-2013. With a large number of new comers to the online fashion market, the market place has become saturated. With this in mind it is vital that online fashion providers are satisfying the needs and wants of their consumers to gain a competitive advantage over others.
A strong insight into consumers buying habits with buying clothes online are more than half of Women feel they have to try items on, a third of them admitted that items have not met to their expectations when purchasing online according to Mintel (online fashion report 2010), suggesting not enough visualization of detail and imagination of how an item would look like on the consumer.
The new online feature trends that have been identified are outfit makers and virtual fitting rooms.
Retailers such as Boden and Oasis have examples such as ‘outfit maker’ and ‘fitting room’ on their websites. These features you simply dress the model to create outfits. Also catwalk videos are illustrating a better idea of the garment detail with the movement of the material on the model, which is becoming extremely popular with online retailers. Also catwalk videos are being used on a few online fashion retailers as they are grasping that consumers need the a better visual of the product.
Taking it one step further there are virtual fitting rooms where you can place items onto one self through webcams, upload a picture of yourself or type your measurements in where a mannequin is produced. Examples can be seen on knickerpicker.com and in this video. Also most recently a lot of other retailers are trailing and experimenting online; NIKEiD,Fit.me and MADE – get to personalise with also a better understanding of the product.