With a growing online marketplace for fashion, we thought it was a good time to share some of our evaluation of what technical features of online stores make one retailer more appealing than another. Top concern for all retailers is meeting range and price points their customers expect, but beyond that, which factors encourage loyalty and increase traffic?
The question is complex, considering how many things are involved in the equation. SEO, visual merchandising, social features, purchase support, CRM and delivery are just a few. Some retailers excel in specific areas but don’t perform so well in others; but interestingly no one retailer is addressing every aspect.
Our approach is to create a metric that measures the success of a retailer’s user experience (UX), editorial and visual merchandising. We are currently tracking over 175 retailers and brands globally against specific metrics – taking a visual snapshot of any image or content changes they make to their website.
An integral part of this process is the site’s navigation. Here are three example evaluations of sites you might know:
Some features are more pertinent to particular retailers (price sensitivity for example) and perhaps you could argue that retailers wouldn’t want to overload their pages with features, but it’s interesting to see that even the industry luminaries differ from each other in their approach.
Subscribers, check out our new Visual Merchandising feature and watch the skies for the scorecard feature coming soon.
Katie Smith
