There are probably thousands of ecommerce stores selling clothes and accessories online. In such a competitive industry, gathering millions of users is something that requires dedicated time and efforts. But  an online apparel store that focuses on a niche, acts as a platform to boutiques, and raises the bar of product curation can do wonders in terms of earnings.

After analyzing such fashion stores, we decided to put the spotlight on design approach, site features, and overall functionality to help entrepreneurs launch a similar venture.

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Business Model and Monetization

Online fashion stores focused on boutiques and brands work with a simple sales focused business model. They provide boutiques and brands a platform to sell their products. While products need to be categorized in a traditional manner (shoes, bags etc), the website should also provide dedicated pages to boutiques where products can be listed.

A fashion store can either leave the delivery part to stores or offer logistical support by charging some commission on every item sold. Profits and efforts will vary accordingly. In addition to profits from product sales, there are a number of monetization options worth exploring. Some of them are:

• Featured designers – Charge a little to designers for extra marketing push on its homepage.
• Banner ads – The website definitely can opt for ads relevant to its audience.
• Boutique sales – Charge extra for every sale by helping the boutiques run special sales.

To multiply profits, your online fashion store clone must be crafted with unique features. Let’s highlight the major ones to give you a better understanding of what exactly you need to create a super fashion store clone.

Major fashion players 

There are many young and establishes names trying to cater to shoppers interested in high-end fashion. Here are ones popular in the online fashion circuits for their uniqueness:

• FarFetch.com
• Net-a-porter.com
• Theoutnet.com
• Modaoperandi.com
• Shopbop.com

Whether you are planning a small online fashion store or a full-fledged marketplace, these sites can give the best idea of design and features.

Online Fashion Store Features

While the idea of ‘marketplace for boutiques’ is unique in itself, the website will play a predominant role in achieving success. Let’s check website features that will help your startup brand to become a Big Deal:

Homepage popup

Plan a pop-up that will introduce users to unique store aspects like number of designers and free returns. The popup will motivate visitors to share personal email address and sign up for a newsletter to get updates about new arrivals, trends and promotions. This is a time-tested approach to gather data, stay connected, and pitch products as well as offers.

Men and Women segregation

Women, unless choosing a gift, have no reason to concern themselves with men collection. Hence, the website should aptly create a unique experience for men and women. With this feature, the whole site experience will be tailored to visitor’s choice with men and women tabs. This is something very few e-commerce websites accomplish.

Homepage

The website homepage should comprise of lots of interactive and visual elements. Apart from main navigation, the website can have:

• Strips focused on Sale and brand USPs.
• Images that act as gateways to men and women categories.
• Strips with links to different product categories, boutiques, designers, etc
• Footer which introduces visitors to social media profiles and other informative pages.

Besides visuals, a fashion website must focus on giving its visitors as many pathways to inner pages as possible without making the homepage too lengthy.

Site Wisdom: A true Fashion store clone will balance visuals with store features

Wishlist

Wishlist feature is present in almost every modern ecommerce website but by keeping in mind some points, you can improve on it. Keep below details in mind while planning Wishlist functionality :

• No need to sign in to add items to Wishlist.
• No limit on items that can be added before sign-in.

Everything should be arranged in a very sleek manner. The items you wish to buy can be automatically added in the lower section of the checkout page for impulse’s sake.

Search

Instead of opting for the search bar and showing results as boring dropdown, try to opt for an interface that puts the focus on search. The results must be aptly categorized under Men and Women categories. The search in itself should be extremely powerful and generate relevant results for every search one undertake. FarFetch has done a remarkable work with search.

Giveaway – If you are thinking of buying a fashion store script, makes sure it has phenomenal search functionality.

Main navigation bar

Work on to retain the unconventional logic in the main navigation bar as well. Besides links to segregate product pages under different categories, also add visual elements to introduce products, designers and create additional sale doorways. We will illustrate most unique navigation tabs to introduce you to the crucial ones. Let’s start with Newly Added tab.

Newly Added – Major chunk of your audience will be interested in fresh fashion. Hence, it is necessary to lay focus on the main navigation bar. Besides links to different product categories, this section should include Newly Added which will pack the latest additions of the day for shoppers. Don’t forget to put the focus on this feature through visuals as well.

Boutiques – Try to give wider reach to independent boutiques if your store focuses on them. The Boutiques tab must introduce new boutiques, and should facilitate boutique discovery by location. The dropdown can be provided with a visual element which puts the spotlight on a particular boutique.

Designers – If boutique is the heart, then, designer is the soul. Therefore, make space for designers in the main navigation. Besides segregating designers under Men and Women, the dropdown should simplify the search. Under this tab, you can make provision to find a graphic showcasing creation of a particular designer.

Other elements that can be a part of navigation bar include Looks, Product, and Sale tabs. All in all, your fashion store navigation must accomplish a lot more in comparison to the ones used by traditional ecommerce stores. Net-a-porter has aced navigation.

Location and language pages

If you want to make a big splash, make your fashion store a global brand that will ship across the world. Integrate powerful functionality to change location. Rather than listing all the countries in one large chunk, divide it into bigger geographical regions.

Every shopper is not comfortable with English. Hence, hosting pages in other languages will work well.

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Product category pages

If the website is hosting thousands of products, filters become a necessity to simplify product search. Building a highly sophisticated filtering functionality will allow the visitors to refine product search on the basis of:

• Boutique
• Location
• Designer
• Other standards options like size and category

Product Pages

If we have to choose one thing that dominates product pages, then, it would definitely be the image. The slider arrangement can put multiple images in focus at once, encouraging the visitor to pay attention. Product details like Description, Size & Fit, Composition & Care, and Shipping related details should be arranged smartly.

To hold visitors that come across product size related issues, the website should have the functionality to get email notifications. Many online stores don’t offer this provision.

Boutique pages

Whether you want to be a platform for independent boutiques or popular brands, your site must have dedicated business pages. However, don’t expect to encounter anything extraordinary on them. The boutique page must include:

• Collage of boutique images
• Available designers
• Boutique description
• Links to its collection

Boutique pages are one of the few important website areas that offer a lot of scope for imagination and improvement.

Sign In and Sign Up

Keep it simple by handling both Sign In and Sign Up on one page with forms placed side by side. Some ecommerce sites also go for the pop-up arrangement. Complicated Sign Up process often discourage the visitor from creating an account. New customers can be asked for following details to create an account:

• Title
• Name
• Email
• Password

The Sign Up can be further simplified if you already have items in your Bag and proceed to Checkout with the first step asking for email address.

Checkout process

Simplify the checkout process for the international audience. With unique features like Paypal payments and store locator, you can raise the bar of planning prime conversion module of ecommerce store. Your online fashion store must divide the checkout process into different sections to make it convenient for customers to proceed to final stage:

• Shipping – Like every ecommerce site, your online store must ship products to homes of shoppers. If you want to walk the extra mile,  allow buyers to get the purchases delivered to fashion store boutique near them (just like FarFetch).
• Payment – Credit card payments are common. Besides that, your store must give its audience the option to pay for their items through Paypal. Cash on Delivery can work for targeting developing nations.
• Review – This can be the last step of the checkout process where shoppers can view their purchases and make final changes in collection address, payment method, and other details.

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Fashion Store Reviews

The brand must realize the importance of client reviews and should put an effective review mechanism in place to gather opinions about boutiques. With powerful filters, reviews about any boutique can be discovered, making purchase decisions easy. The whole review interface needs to be super smooth, and the dedicated page should emphasize on brand USPs and assistance.

Help and Contact Us

Help section needs to be highly intuitive so that shoppers don’t struggle while finding answers to their questions. The page must include sections like:

• How to Shop
• Orders and Shipping
• Returns and Refunds
• Click and Collect
• FAQs
• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy

The point is that if you want to create a fashion store clone, you need to think hard about usability.

Contact Form

Take considerable amount of time to create effective contact forms. Besides regular fields like Name, Email, Subject, and Message, add unique options like:

• Contact preferences
• Query type
• Attachments

Ecommerce stores rarely spend time to plan contact forms with customer convenience in mind. Think about this while creating your ecommerce store clone.

Don’t care about the established norms of building an ecommerce website. Focus on the brand requirements and approach the project with new ideas. This will result in a website that will be way ahead of its competitors in terms of user experience, design and features.

While building a fashion store, you will certainly come across problems that can baffle first-time shoppers. Here are some pointers to handle them:

• In order to make the website appealing, plan the areas more aptly to display different product categories.
• Adding social media features and image gallery would enhance the experience of shoppers. Just like ‘top shop’ that has done a good job with social media buttons.
• In the viewpoint of a good design, don’t overlook SEO. Emphasize on link structure to improve its performance on search engines.
• Create a dedicated page or a form for boutiques that want to join your fashion store for future business partnership.

Entrepreneurs planning to launch a online fashion store need to understand that a half heart effort will spoil the ecommerce game. To become big like TheOutnet and Shopbop, keep branding consistent on every page.

In short, buying an online fashion store script may not serve the purpose. Investing in an experienced team of UX designers, experienced coders, SEO and conversion specialists is a much better bet. Whatever you choose, just make sure your team takes care of the above-listed features and suggestions.
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