4 tips to improve fashion e-commerce performance using outfits

By
Sam L'Honoré
23/5/2022
3 min read

#ootd

This is one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram. But what does it mean? Outfit of the day.

What exactly is an outfit? It is the various garments and items of clothing that one is wearing at the same time.

Composing an outfit is a way to express style and personality through what you are wearing. Depending on what you match it with, a same garment can express different styles, and therefore speak to different segments of clients. Be it in advertising, on shopwindow mannequins or in each seasonal collection's lookbook, fashion brands need to pay specific attention to how they use outfits.

In e-commerce, outfits are a great way to engage clients and help them project themselves with the clothing. They can help accelerate conversion, but also improve cross-sell and increase average order value. Here are 4 methods to use outfits to improve performances for your fashion e-commerce website.

Outfits are a special weapon for fashion brands to improve their online performance

Displaying a complete outfit helps client projection online

On the Internet, since customers cannot try on products, it is important to help them project themselves by showing them the clothes in situation.

However, a garment is rarely worn alone: it is always matched with other clothes or accessories. Showing a garment in a situation means presenting it in a look.

According to a survey conducted by Veesual in 2021, the first thing customers look at on a product page of a fashion e-commerce site is the photos of the garment being worn.

To better project themselves, they look for examples of how to wear the garment. By showing each piece in a stylish outfit, we create the desire and help the customer to build his purchase intention.

Outfits can help improve conversion online

When customers can better project themselves, they are more likely to buy.

Studies conducted by the recommendation engine Stylitics showed a 25% increase in conversion rate when marketing content sent by fashion brands included recommendations in the form of outfits.

Outfits are a powerful tool to improve cross-sell and increase average order value

When showing a garment in situation in a complete outfit, we are looking to showcase the main item, but it is obviously also a great way to showcase complementary items.

Consumers are sensitive to this: according to our survey, nearly one out of two customers usually look for complementary products included in the models' look on the product page photos.

The look is therefore an important element in the discovery of the collection, and offers a great potential to generate cross-sell, or purchase of complementary items.

How to use outfits to improve performances of my fashion e-commerce website?

Let clients "shop the look" with complementary products recommendation systems

Since customers are used to looking for complementary products worn by the model in her outfit, we might as well make it easy for them!

More and more brands are putting them forward directly next to the images. This is often done on the lookbook pages, to buy directly the proposed outfits. Sometimes, all the items of the look are proposed in quick purchase as a bundle: it's the famous "Shop the look!"

On the product page, it is also possible to use the looks to propose complementary items to the customer, to propose to compose a complete outfit from the consulted garment. This outfit can be the same as the one shown on the photo, or it can be different (for example if the products shown on the photo are no longer available in stock).

Boost cross-sell with personalized product recommendation

Using artificial intelligence, complementary product recommendations can be personalized to each customer.

Personalization is a very powerful tool that allows each customer to see a look that speaks to them and in which they recognize themselves: they are therefore more likely to buy. By personalizing the look for each customer according to their style, the brand is more likely to generate cross-sell.

Studies have shown that the introduction of recommendations in the form of personalized looks on fashion e-commerce sites has increased the average shopping basket by 25%.

Personalized recommendation modules rely on data collected about customers to propose complementary products corresponding to their profile. For the recommendation to be relevant, it is important that the customer has left the collection of data on his navigation active (cookies...) or that his profile is recorded (login...).

Let clients compose their outfits with "mix & match" systems

When a customer goes shopping in a store, he is inspired by the looks suggested by the brand on the posters or on the mannequins present in the store, but above all he creates his own look by grabbing different clothes on the fly.

Putting together outfits by matching different garments is an important part of the shopping experience. It allows the customer to actively project themselves with the clothes and express their own style.

But often in e-commerce, navigating through categories is difficult: you have to go back and forth between pages in a very analytical way. To facilitate the creation of looks, the "Mix & Match" modules allow to match different categories of clothes on the same page.

Customers can easily put together the outfit they like regardless of the brand's stylists' recommendations.

Implement a virtual dressing room to let clients visualize outfits on models that look like them

To best reproduce the shopping experience, once we let the customer create his look, we must help him visualize it, as he would do in a store by going into a fitting room.

Veesual's Model Try-On e-commerce plugin allows each customer to compose his or her look and visualize it on a mannequin he or she identifies with. The customer can choose from a variety of mannequins (morphology, skin color, hair, style...) and see how the outfit will look when worn.

It's a whole new e-commerce experience that maximizes projection: the customer expresses his own style and identity with the clothes, and therefore projects himself more easily.

Studies have shown that customers who use virtual dressing room experiences have 25% increase in conversion rate and 15% increase in average order value. Furthermore, due to the possibility to visualise garments on a model that looks like them, these clients also showed a 30% lower return rate than clients who did not use this feature.

Implementing a virtual dressing room allows to capitalize on all benefits of an outfit-based customer experience to improve the performance of your fashion e-commerce website. It also allows you to differentiate and upgrade your e-commerce website by implementing a brand new customer experience that is specifically designed for fashion e-commerce.

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