Online Retail Insights: Apparel Retailers Need to Evolve
The holiday season is right around the corner, meaning most e-retailers are in the thick of finalizing promotional campaigns and optimizing websites in the hopes of increasing traffic and avoiding conversion roadblocks. However, before launching their email, social and traditional advertising campaigns, many online retailers would be well served to take the time to re-evaluate the overall digital experience they're delivering to visitors.
User experience (UX), the digital side of customer experience (CX), is an admittedly harder metric to quantify than response time and related technical web performance metrics. However, its impact on a business has been increasingly recognized by the web performance community as the key online competitive differentiator. That's not to say that response and DOM load times no longer matter, but optimizing for these metrics eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns. The UX doesn't revolve solely around how quickly your website renders. The content being rendered, and the way it's delivered to your audience, is just as important — probably more so for online clothing brands.
Last year, apparel was the most popular purchase category on Cyber Monday. This is a good category to delve into with respect to UX, especially when you consider that most people still prefer to buy their clothes in-store. When talking about delivering an ideal UX in the context of e-commerce, the goal is to reduce friction and provide visitors with an experience that feels less like a list of tasks that need to executed to procure an item, and more like a seamless interaction between what brought the user to the page and the content being delivered. This means providing a plethora of relevant information in the form of images, videos and concise, helpful copy — all while delivering it in a way that doesn't require the visitor to think about what's being presented on the page.
There are a number of online clothing retailers that have succeeded in designing sites that meet all of these requirements, mainly by providing the user with a virtual online experience that's as close as you can get to trying on an item in store. So, how is this achieved?
Multiple high-quality images: Shoppers want to see what they're buying. A single, zoomed-out image of the shirt or dress they're interested in won't cut it. Buyers want to see the details — what the fabric looks like up close and how it contrasts with the stitching; are the soles of the sneakers black or orange; is that pair of denim selvedge or not; does that plaid have red or pink highlights; etc. These are the types of questions multiple high-quality images will answer immediately.
Product videos: Different clothes and brands fit differently. For example, seeing where a shirt hem hits or the fit of a pair of jeans on a real person as they walk provides a much more tangible idea of how the garment will fit for the buyer.
Product-relevant information: Relevant information means that it will help visitors understand how an article of clothing will actually look, feel and fit when they receive it. Providing images and video of clothing isn't enough; online clothiers need to take the next step and provide context for that media. Provide the height and weight of the model for both the video and images (if applicable), the size being worn and the measurements for each size, for example.
Every online marketer knows you need to have great product promo copy, info, photos and video to sell your product online, but for you to maximize these efforts you need to tie it all together and be delivered in a package that draws the user in. However, making these changes and monitoring results is critical to discovering how to deliver the optimal online experience to your users while ensuring you're meeting generally accepted performance standards.
These changes and updates need to be executed and monitored under the guidance of your web development/operations team to ensure that the site is still performing within web performance standards. Keep in mind that new video and images can slow down pages that have been previously optimized for performance speed.
Andrew McHugh is a technical content manager at SmartBear Software, where he's responsible for overseeing marketing and content strategy related to AlertSite and the monitoring product family. Andrew can be reached at andrew.mchugh@smartbearsoftware.com.
