Selling clothing online comes down to two questions in the customer head: will it fit, and what happens if it does not. Get those right and the rest of the store is comparatively easy. Get them wrong and you pay for it twice, once in the sales you never made and again in the parcels coming back.
The fit problem
Most returns are not faults, they are guesses that went wrong. The fix is information rather than a stricter policy:
- Model height and the size they are wearing, on every product.
- Actual garment measurements, not just a generic size chart.
- A plain fit note: runs small, oversized, true to size.
- Fabric and stretch, because a fitted shape in a rigid fabric behaves nothing like the same shape with give.
Product pages that do the work
Photography carries the sale. The garment on its own for detail, worn on a person for shape and scale, and a close-up of the fabric for texture and quality. Beyond the images, the copy should answer what a customer would otherwise have to guess: what it is made of, how to wash it, whether it is lined, how it sits. Getting the photography right is its own job, which we covered in product photography for an online store.
Returns as a sales tool
A clear returns policy sells. People buy more confidently when they know how to send something back, and burying the policy does not reduce returns, it reduces orders. Whether you offer free returns is a margin decision, but whichever you choose, say it plainly on the product page and not only in the footer.
Then the shop itself
Filters that work on a phone, a checkout with as few steps as you can manage, and stock that is honest about what is left. If you sell in drops, the store needs to handle a spike gracefully, because a launch that falls over is worse than one that never happened.
The short version. Answer will it fit before anyone has to ask, photograph properly, make returns easy to find, and keep the checkout short. Fit and returns are where fashion stores are won and lost.
More on the sector on our page for fashion, and how we build stores under ecommerce.