The 6 Keys To Building A Great Online Fashion Store

Online fashion stores are getting a lot of press lately with stories of major investments and incredible growth. Nasty Gal, which started as an e-bay store, just raised $40 million. Others such as ShoeDazzle, BeachMint, and Gilt Group received huge investments as well. Meanwhile, many online fashion stores are struggling to turn a profit. So the question is – how did they get there?

Let’s take a look at the 6 things that help to set apart the best online fashion stores.

1. Define Your Product Niche – Many online fashion stores, and brands in general, make the mistake of not clearly defining and sticking to their niche market. They believe that casting the widest net possible will lead to more sales. This is a waste of your time and resources. Giant national retailers have the market for average stuff cornered. Build your brand around your niche audience and focus all of your efforts on them to turn them into raving fans. Take Black Milk Clothing, for example. They started by focusing on leggings and built a world-wide audience of people looking for unique, patterned leggings. Now they have expanded their offering but still stick to their roots.
2. Refine Your Brand Persona – Branding is more than just your logo and color scheme. Branding is about emotion, and in e-commerce creating an emotional experience for your customers is becoming crucial. Determine what personality your brand has? Are you rebellious, caring, spiritual? An explorer, a jokester, a creator? Own it & be consistent – there’s nothing like a crazy, all over the place branding experience to turn your audience off – don’t you agree?
3. Get A Makeover and Clean Up That Messy Website – If your website looks like someone threw up on it and it came out of the MySpace days, guess what? No one will buy from you. Invest in a professionally designed website. Branded content such as photos, videos, and stories should be used to create that emotional experience for customers and keep them on your page. Good navigation is absolutely crucial to turn those browsing customers into buyers. There are plenty of easy to use solutions out there for online fashion stores like Squarespace, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
4. Be A Leader and Build A Community – I say be a leader because leaders attract other leaders – or as they’re commonly referred to in marketing, influencers. Influencers share their knowledge and interests with their peers, which can lead to new traffic to your site. Social media posts can go a long way in influencing purchase decisions. This is why it’s so important to connect with influencers.
5. Earn Your Customers Trust – People want to make sure that others had a positive experience with a company before pressing that buy button. They also want to know that they can easily return a product in case it isn’t exactly what they wanted.To earn your customers trust you must provide:
   – convenient shipping and return policies
   – Secure check-out gateway
   – Plenty of customer reviews and testimonialsIf you can, try to include free shipping – free shipping helps build trust as it enables customers to not fully commit.
6. Provide Value – Your potential customers want value. Value is perceived and it means something different for your audience. Maybe your value is premium quality, uniqueness, or a different point of view or process. Overall, your product needs to differentiate itself and branding can help with your unique sales proposition. It’s important that you offer a specific, niched product, and you tout what makes you different from the competition. Whether you are selling organic beauty products or ethically manufactured tee shirts, let your customers know what makes you different. And keep your integrity – lying doesn’t work – keep true to what your brand really is

A #GLOBALInfluencer brand is an authentic, socially conscious brand that provides real value to its customers. People want brands with their best interests at heart regardless of their geographic location.

[Tweet “Being connected to your customers while being a responsible brand will differentiate your business from the competition.”]