Howdy fashion chics!
Have you ever wondered about creating your online fashion store, but don’t know how to get started? In this article, I’ll introduce you the essentials when choosing a fashion eCommerce WordPress Theme for your online store. This article is based on our research for the latest WooCommerce theme – Nitro. In this research, we collect information from 400+ best online fashion stores in multiple categories and sizes. The elements which are mentioned below are highly recommended or must-have for a successful eCommerce store.
Types of fashion eCommerce sites
There are many fashion sites for many target customers out there. In a nutshell, there are 6 kinds of fashion stores:
General fashion
Fashion for men
Fashion for women
Fashion for kids
Shoes
Jewelries
General fashion
General fashion sites combine fashion product items for a broad range of target audiences.
ASOS is a general fashion store selling items for both women and men
Based on the research for General fashion, we have conducted our findings to build the best fashion eCommerce WordPress themeFabulous. This niche demo combines every essential eCommerce features for fashion.
Fabulous is a super flexibleFashion eCommerce WordPress theme demo that can be used to sell any kinds of fashion products.
Fashion for men
Unlike General fashion, fashion stores for men bring a masculine look on the design layouts.
Vincent D’Amrique brings a powerful yet minimal look from the first glance.
Jack & Jones, a denim fashion store for men, brings an urban look.
December is the best fashion eCommerce WordPress theme demo that combines every necessary elements for you. This demo is also the result of our detailed research for 50+ men fashion stores all around the world. Because of its flexibility, it can also be used for other products.
December is only one in our 8 niche demos. More demos for fashion eCommerce WordPress theme can be found HERE
Fashion for women
In opposition to Fashion for men, fashion for women stores bring a wholly fresh and feminine impression.
Glamorous is a most well-known name for all women fashionistas
Or modern and elegant as Long Tall Sally – a typical fashion for women store
Pillow is a combination of feminine look and eCommerce-focused, with ready-made features to let you sell women fashion products instantly without too many customizations. Below are some highlights of Pillow:
Top promotion/ information bar
3 product variations styles
Size guide
Sale page
Explore full demo of Pillow
Fashion for kids
If fashion items for adults seem to be monochrome and dull, the world of fashion for kids is far more colorful. In those fashion stores, there are some specifications like kid’s development stages in advanced filters.
Peekkids brings most up-to-date fashion items for your kids
Carter’s is a leading fashion store for kids from newly-born to toddler
We notice that on fashion eCommerce WordPress theme market, there haven’t been any niche demo primarily for kids. Therefore, we have built Kidoki as the best fit for those who want to sell fashion items for kids.
Kidoki – Fashion store for kidsbrings you back to childhood with alluring color tones. Besides its colorful layouts, this demo always reaches the best performance on all devices.
Shoes
Unlike the 2000s, shoes nowadays are becoming a fashion product types with various kinds of styles and materials. There are many giant footwear retailers like JustFab, ShoeDazzle, etc. where people can even browse virtually to pick up their favorite pairs of shoes every month. According to a report by IBISWorld in 2015, the revenue from shoes solely for US Market in 2015 is 12 billion dollars. With the assumption that the average price of a pair of shoe is $100, there are approximately 120 million pairs of footwear sold in the US in 2015. Up till now, this statistic may be even higher.
Because shoes is also a made-to-fit fashion product, an online shoe store is required to bring convenience for their customers as they are visiting a shoe store in person. Therefore, there must be some eCommerce features to let customers try on shoes before purchasing. These features could be:
Custom attributes
Size guide
If you are planning to sell shoes online, Shoe Passion would be a great example for you.
R2VF is a niche demo for selling shoes with many spaces to show product items. In this demo, we have packed every essential from 50+ real online shoe stores
Jewelries
Jewelry is a typical fashion accessory products, with sparkling layouts to show lots of product item variations and styles.
ZALES is a typical jewelry store with all essential features for this certain kind of fashion item.
Allurez is also an excellent way to learn more about how to sell jewelry online.
From 50+ shops, we built the Nivellia with layouts and features best fit with a real jewelry shop. This is a simple start for you with all pre-cooked layouts. Even the size guides are custom made for each jewelry category.
You can try Nivellia for free HERE>
Each type of fashion store has different design layouts and product types, but they all have some common elements. When building this WooCommerce theme, we have analyzed 400+ real fashion stores to conduct into a website analytics file containing most popular web elements appeared in fashion sites.
General
Below are some essential elements that you need to check when purchasing a fashion eCommerce WordPress theme.
MegaMenu (must-have)
A Mega Menu with more than 1 column is a must-have for 74% fashion sites in our research.
The Mega Menu can be used to list all product categories as well as sub-categories. It is also a great place to push sale for your promotion campaigns.
The mega menu is flexible. It can be utilized for many purposes:
The world well-known fashion retailer – ASOS, has a mega menu with more than 1 column for all kinds of product categories. They also use this mega menu to boost sale for some promotion campaigns like “20% OFF ASOS Collection,” “Multipacks SAVE,” or “Latest Markdowns.”
You can use mega menu to display product category thumbnails like ROSEGAL
Have a free shipping campaign? Just put in on the mega menu like Last Season. By doing that, everyone who once browses the menu from anywhere can see your promotion banner.
We understand the importance of the mega menu for WooCommerce themes fashion store owners. That’s why we include our this mega menu into Nitro.
You can experience Mega Menu right from here.
Top promotion/ information bar (must-have)
Every big online retailer site has a top promotion or information bar. Why? Because it helps them put top important information on the top of every place on the site. When scrolling down, this top bar will not disappear, so you can be sure that your customers can always see these information as long as they are on your site.
The top bar plays the role of displaying necessary information, such as wishlist, language/location/currency switcher, hotline number, etc.
This minimal top information from J.Crew with some customer account elements, and location switcher.
The top bar can also be a perfect place to put promotion messages for your marketing campaigns.
You can put promotion messages with the link to campaign’s landing pages like La Redoute.
According to our research on fashion store, there is 60.78% real fashion store using this top bar. Therefore, we decided to include this top bar into our niche demo for fashion eCommerce WordPress theme. If you use Nitro, you can customize the layout, elements and content of this top bar by using the Header Builder.
A top bar on Pillow fashion demo. You can also create your top bar here
Footer
For eCommerce sites, footer is not only a place to show some general information links like “About us,” “Company,” “Privacy Policy.” It is a secondary place to show more valuable information to help customers get the items that they want quickly. These information links can be like “shipping & return,” “size guide,” etc.
Email subscription bar & social icons (must-have)
According to our research for fashion eCommerce WordPress theme niche demos, there are 2 must-have elements that you should include on your fashion store: email subscription and social icons.
The footer of Last Season, an online New Zealand fashion store, has both email subscription bar and social icons. Besides them, there are other elements like social icons, general information links.
These 2 vital footer elements have been applied on all demos of Nitro. This is an example of how they appear on Kidoki – fashion for kids demo. For the newsletter bar, you can customize it easily by using WordPress widgets.
Payment methods (highly recommended)
Besides email subscription bar and social icons, payment method icons are also highly recommended (with 41.18% fashion sites using it) to help customers get a glance on every about how they can check out. In other words, if you only put payment method icons on checkout page, they have to add some items to shopping cart, then go to checkout to see how they can finish the payment. And that is not flexible!
Rose Gal, a women fashion retailer, includes all necessary footer elements, especially payment method icons.
Popup (highly recommended)
A popup (sometimes called a lightbox) is a special box that is used for a specific promotion purpose.
The purpose of popup is to give an vigorous call-to-action. If you own a fashion eCommerce store that needs sale pushing in high peak seasons, then pop-up box is an ideal choice for you.
According to a test on Aweber on a handmade shop owner on Etsy, the pop-up box option drove 1,375% more email signups vs. the traditional sidebar form.
A popup on Simons‘s online store to collect email signups
There are some purposes of popups that you can consider to use:
Give promotion message for a sale-off season
Boost email lists or social followers
Reduce cart abandonment rate (by displaying exit-intent popups)
Cross-sell or up-sell
Time-limited popups
Extra tip:
Popups sometimes can cause theannoying effect to your customers, or cause slow loading for your site. The golden key here is delivering the right content for the right target audience at the right time. Don’t display only one popup message for everyone.
Others
If you run an international fashion store, consider to include the 3 following elements on your site:
Multilingual
Multi-currency
Shipping to/Location preference
Multilingual
Provide site content in multiple languages with a language switcher. To do this, you have to translate your site content using a WordPress translation plugin.
Polylang is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to make a multilingual WordPress site. It is compatible with allfashion eCommerce WordPress theme demos of Nitro
Multi-currency
Switch product price into another currency.
We made a ready-made currency switcher element for you using WR Currency plugin. This plugin supports unlimited currencies.
Shipping to/Location preference
If have different shipping price or shipping policy, then putting a location preference on the top of your site may help your customers better manage their orders.
The drop-down location switcher like La Perla is convenient for customers in different areas.
Home
There can be many kinds of layout for fashion store’s homepage. Some go with minimalist look with fewer elements as possible. Some prefer more product showoff. For whichever style, 2 essential elements always appear on a fashion store are Main promo banners and Secondary promo banners.
Main promo banners
There are 81.82% real fashion stores having an area for main promo banners – the biggest promo area on your homepage. The purpose of this field is to show most major promotions, new arrivals, new collections, etc. at first glance of your customers.
You can choose to display only a static banner or a slider with multiple banners. The choice depends on your purpose: focusing on only one promotion campaign or pushing sale for various campaigns.
Simons goes with minimal static banner for their new knitwear collection. This banner has a call-to-action button which redirects to a landing page for knitwear collection.
Linzi includes many banners on the main promo to show multiple holiday collections.
Secondary promo banners
Unlike the big main promo, secondary promo banners stand in smaller space on the homepage. This type of banner can have different sizes or use the same size. The purpose of secondary promo banners, just like main ones, is to promote for some specific campaigns. But the campaign’s priority for secondary promo banners is lower than those on the main promo banners.
Secondary banners may have different sizes (source: Tobi)
Another usage of secondary promo banners is to show product category thumbnails like Linzi
Extra tips
Below are some key features that lead to a conversion-focus homepage:
Keep it clean and easy to readFor the call-to-action, maintain the message short and sharp
For the call-to-action, maintain the message short and sharpBetter if there are some spaces to show product items
Better if there are some spaces to show product itemsNotice the loading performance
Notice the loading performance
Shop
There are 3 main shop pages for a WordPress fashion store:
Product category
Product detail
Sale
Product category
Except for single product sites, every fashion store with multiple products must have several product category pages. According to our research, almost all fashion stores are using the default grid layout for product list (80-90%). This design is so popular that it is quite familiar and comfortable to use for universal customers.
Product category page for “Dress Shirts” products of Menswearhouse.
There is a critical element of every fashion store, whether it’s the fashion store for men, women, or kids, is advanced filter.
What is advanced filter?
The advanced filter helps customers navigate the product items that they are seeking easier and faster. In the best-selling book “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz, the more choice you give to customers, the easier it is to choose nothing. Therefore, improving the advanced filter is the best way to shorten customer’s journey to checkout page, which results in higher conversion rate.
What to filter?
For fashion products, there are 3 must-have filter elements: “Price,” “Size,” and “Color.”
Price
Price is the first and foremost element of every online fashion store, as well as other eCommerce stores. Price filter allows customers to pick up product items that are best fit with their budget.
Some shops give predefined price ranges.
Roger David defines some specific price ranges on advanced filter.
But the dragging style is far more flexible. Customers can pick up any cost range based on their needs.
Just a drag and then you will have a filtered product item listing on Men’s Look. How simple it is!
Size
Most of all fashion product items are made to fit. Thus it’s necessary to have size filter to help specific customers with different sizes browse items that are best fit with them.
Johnny Bigg defines different sizes for different products (Suits, Tops, Pants, Shoes)
A universal size filter on Pillow – Women Fashion Demo
Size filter can also be based on target users. For example, in fashion for kids store, the size filter is based on kid’s development stages.
Carter’s filters clothes’ sizes based on baby’s development stages (from newly-born to 24 months)
Kidokiis a fashion eCommerce WordPress theme demo which is using size filter based on kid’s development stages
Color
Besides the must-have ones, some optional elements can be considered to included in the advanced filter, like “Brands” or “Patterns.”
Connor uses the default multiple-choice style
Color picker style is a better choice if your fashion store has many colors.
Product detail
On product detail page, there are 2 essential elements:
Multiple-image view
Attributes (for almost all items)
Multiple-image view
Unlike software or stock photos, customers cannot touch or try fashion products. Therefore, the product image section must include multiple images. The goal is to help customers have an overview of how the item looks on different angles.
This T-shirt on Karmaloop have the main front view, and 2 more view angles for back and side. Multiple images for this T-shirt, therefore, results in better imagination of this T-shirt on customer’s body.
By default, every WooCommerce theme allows you to upload multiple product images. But what happens if you have more than one product variation (e.g.: different color variations)?
Follow the second must-have: Custom Attributes
Custom Attributes
As mentioned above, almost all fashion items are made to fit products, which means they all have some custom variations, like color and size.
Size is a must-have element for crop top product on Hello Molly.
This V-Neck Tee from Dotti Australia is more friendly to customers with color picker variation. Color and size often go together for fashion items, besides some exceptions, like scarfs or free-size products, etc.
By default, a WooCommerce theme does not allow you to display multiple product images for different variations. But you can do that using the WR Advanced Attributes plugin. Up ’til now, this plugin is FREE included for all Nitro users.
Size guide
Product sizes often goes with size guide (or often called size chart), with the aim to help customers pick up their best product size. On a size guide, there are usually the size chart table (maybe also size converter), and sizing guide.
The size guide goes with size variations (Source: ASOS)
Extra tip:
Keep the size guide the best fit with each product: Don’t make one size guide for all products. On the above example of ASOS, the size guide for the Linen Mix T-Shirt is size guides for T-Shirt & Tops. This size guide is quite matched with this T-Shirt product. But if you make a size guide for all the goods on ASOS, customers may find it hard to figure out the metrics that they need.
Size guide for Linen Mix T-Shirt on ASOS
Size guide for “Rings” products on Zales
Learn from best size guides: Don’t know where to start? You can find out how top fashion stores using size guides. ASOS Women’s size guide is a great example for reference.
Pick up a WooCommerce plugin to help you make size guides: there are many WooCommerce plugin that can help you build size guides.
YITH Product Size Charts for WooCommerce ($49-$149) by YIThemes (premium) allows you to assign more than one size chart to a particular product. There are 3 display modes for size chart including tab, popup, or tabled popup.
Size Guide Plugin by CreateIT ($18) is a WordPress plugin that helps you generate different size guides for various products.
Note: A smarter choice is to purchase a fashion eCommerce WordPress theme that is packed with a size guide plugin. In this way, you will save an amount of money for setting up your store. Nitro package has included both the Size Guide Plugin by CreateIT and some ready-made size guide contents for each fashion demo.
Sale
“Sale” page is the essential place that is specifically built for promotion purpose. There are 82.35% fashion store having “Sale” page.
Sale’s page layout is frequently default grid with sale-off product list.
Be minimal like Whistles
Or super catchy with top promo banner like Live Clothing
If you have a “Sale” page on your fashion store, don’t forget to put at least one way to “Sale” page on your main menu. This helps customers easily navigate the “Sale” page.
A link to “Sale” page with red text helps customers instantly navigate the “Sale” page. From ICE Design
Split your sale page into different landing pages, like sale-off for product categories, or custom sales, etc. like Select Fashion is another choice for you. In this way, you can manage your sale-off better via landing pages.
In some cases, don’t hesitate to create some other ways to “Sale” page on the place that you think many of your customers may notice. This could be Homepage, top information bar, footer, etc. Look at your store’s statistics and pick up some hottest paths to “Sale” page.
Another way to “Sale” page on homepage of ICE Design may bring double sales.
Extra tip:
Keep the layout simple and easy to catch information: the best way is to use the same layout with product category page to make it familiar with your customers.
In conclusion
Besides these above features, we believe that there are much more fascinating ones about which we haven’t heard. If you know any interesting fashion stores, or need to share with us your thoughts on essential eCommerce features for a fashion eCommerce WordPress theme that you are using, feel free to share with us right in the below comment section.
The post The Essentials of A Great Fashion eCommerce WordPress Theme appeared first on WooRockets.