2019 Design Trends Clothing eCommerce Websites Should Watch

Find out how to turn your clothing eCommerce websites into a branded and personal shopping guide designed to get your customers from point a to point b pain free.

Design Trends Clothing eCommerce Websites

Using an online website to purchase clothes isn’t the same kind of experience as visiting a brick and mortar store.

Brick and mortar stores rely on face to face engagement — It’s a recipe that will remain the same no matter where you shop.

Obviously online stores can’t do this, so they require design elements targeted at personalization throughout the shopping experience. You don’t have any assistants to guide you through the store, help you select the right items, answer questions or aid in keeping  a customer from leaving.

Right from the start, the design of the website has to be the ultimate guide to any potential shopper.

Things have to be intuitive and engaging without slowing down the shopping process. The customer can leave at any time and you want to keep them interested in your products as long as possible.

The art of running a successful online shop has many nuances, especially when we’re talking about clothing eCommerce websites. With that in mind, I’m going to cover the most important and easiest design trends to implement for your clothing eCommerce websites.

1.    Convenience is essential

If you’re making a website for an online retailer, you’ve got to keep a few key things in mind.

First of all, it has to be good-looking in a way that attracts the right kind of potential customers.

After all, what good is a beautiful site if people feel inconvenienced by using it?

Your main priority has to be ease of use. If there’s something people don’t like while looking for clothes, it’s things getting in their way. Imagine if you had to jump through hoops to buy a shirt at your local store.

When we talk about convenience for you shoppers, ultimately what we’re talking about is getting users from the front page to a product in the shortest amount of time possible.

ecommerce clothing homepage design

ArmyNavyOutdoors.com is a great example of an eCommerce home page designed to get the customer where they need to be ASAP by providing multiple navigational options based on different criteria. For example; the customer can do a search right from the header, or shop by brand, by category using their quick guide, and again by the most popular categories. Everything about this home page is designed to funnel the customer to a desired location.

 

When we talk about getting the most out of a clothing eCommerce website, we need to focus on keeping elements to a minimum and bringing them together cohesively.

Regardless of their size or niche, the best clothing eCommerce websites have a few things in common:

  • Good visual communication with their customers
  • Use product descriptions to give character to their products
  • Tell an appealing story with their About page
  • Avoid selling on their homepage
  • Regularly introduce new products
  • Sell a specific look
  • Make it easy for shoppers to buy the right size and fitting
  • Invite customers to be part of their community
  • Leverage user-generated content (customer reviews) to help sell their products

 

Using ArmyNavyOutdoors as our example again, we can see how they effectively bring many of these elements together to tell their brand story and make the shopping experience a success.

(An about us page that keeps with their brand messaging)

 

(A unique and detailed product description, clear CTA’s and order incentives)

 

(and that user generated content in the form of reviews that we mentioned)

2.    A good look is important

Having a functional website is great, but if your intention is to sell attractive clothes, you’re going to want it to look the part.

If potential customers can’t trust you to have a website that looks professional, how can they trust you to make quality clothing?

Just having your eCommerce clothing website look nice isn’t enough, either. The website has to have a theme, preferably a theme that matches the clothes being sold. If you sell death metal T-shirts in a frilly pink setting, shoppers are going to get confused.

Elements on your website have to be just as aesthetic as they are practical. You need to think about your brand and what it represents.

ecommerce clothing websites branded

The website aesthetic has to match your clothes in order to attract the right kind of customer. It takes a fraction of a second for the human mind to process what it sees and that first impression has to be consistent with what the customer expects. When it comes to fashion, switching things up is great, but that doesn’t necessarily apply to websites.

 

3.    Videos are on the rise

Having pretty photos of your line of clothing is going to attract a lot of people, but there’s something even more potent at selling things – videos.

Videos are a relatively new addition to marketing essentials on the internet. When it comes to media, videos are ranked pretty high up by internet marketers. For one, the conversion rate they provide is much higher than any other medium. For whatever reason, people are most inspired to buy things if the advertisement is in video form.

It might have something to do with how relatable the content is.

Having a video on your website makes users spend more time browsing it. This makes quite a bit of sense when you think about it. Photos are easy to skim through, while you have to watch a video for at least a little while to see what it’s really about. Videos weren’t always the most viable way to advertise things. They take up a lot of bandwidth and you need quite a bit of artistic talent to get them right. Luckily, with technology improving as much as it has in the past few years, having a video on your website has become a breeze. Many clothing brands are opting for videos to get their point across nowadays.

 

4.    Optimizing your website

All the aesthetics of the world won’t get people to visit your website if they can’t find it.

showing up at the top of google

As a retailer, your goal isn’t to have a hidden gem online, it’s to spread the word of your brand to every corner of the internet. Having your website at the top of search engines is extremely important for this purpose. Search engine optimization should always be a priority for web developers.

Getting search engines like Google to like you isn’t the easiest task. This is probably why retailers consult agencies like GWM SEO Wollongong to help them optimize their websites first. There are thousands of variables in play, some of which have very few to do with design. The most important ones designers should focus on are things like page speed. Pages that are too slow won’t see the light of day on search engines. This is why it’s important to find the perfect number of elements on a website so that they won’t interfere with page speed. If you go overboard with elements, it might be too much for the website to handle. Find moderation and keep it simple.

5.    Using WordPress for eCommerce?

Many small businesses have chosen WordPress as their platform for creating their online store. It has become the go-to platform for this purpose because it has hundreds of plugins that make it easy to setup and start selling.

Keep in mind WordPress doesn’t come with eCommerce preinstalled. What does this mean to you?

Well, you will need to install WooCommerce yourself or purchase a theme with WooCommerce installed already. Just a quick heads up… you will need several plugins to make your WordPress eCommerce website fully functional. Luckily, this post, covers the essential WordPress eCommerce plugins that you will need for setting up a successful online store.

 

6.    Marketing potential

Online retail websites have one main purpose – getting customers to purchase products.

Since the website is already available, there’s no reason you can’t use it to its full potential. In order to build brand loyalty, you could set up a blog on your website. Blogs are the ideal place for customers to learn all there is to know about your brand and any relevant news pertaining to your clothing lines.

Creating high quality, engaging content can have benefits ranging from better awareness of your brand all the way up to an increase in sales. And consider this: one study showed that businesses with active blogs received approximately 55% more visitors to their website than those without.

If you want to get see in detail how to put together an eCommerce blogging strategy to exponentially grow your clothing eCommerce website’s business, click here.

 

The good thing about websites is that they can double as advertising platforms for the same things they sell. Make sure to utilize social media to get people to visit your website. You should set up accounts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter in order to advertise it. With the right kind of content, people be incentivized to check out your brand in order to see what it offers. Just make sure you include a link to your website in social media posts.

Conclusion

In conclusion, optimizing e-commerce websites can be a doozy. Not only do you have to focus on the user experience in navigating the website, but you also have to make sure your website is liked by search engines so that it can even show up. Luckily, people have researched these things and there are some well-established things you can do to help your website prosper. However, things are constantly changing in this dynamic environment so make sure you’re always on top of the latest trends.