When planning to start an eCommerce business, you are surrounded by many questions like:
Today, eCommerce has shaped the global retail market. The eCommerce industry accounts for trillions of dollars of global sales and shows no signs of a downtrend across multiple categories—whether fashion, electronics, furniture, digital goods, food, or more. Our experts have performed an in-depth analysis and research on the online fashion and apparel market.
Read this guide to know the global perspective, opportunities, market leaders, trends, and checklist to build a fashion eCommerce marketplace.
In 2024, the global eCommerce fashion market was valued at nearly $660.35 billion. It is expected to surpass that figure by 2030 and reach an impressive $1,160.56 billion. The reason behind the encouraging growth in this sector is the continuous progression of the online shopping experience offered by popular fashion eCommerce marketplaces, driven by innovation.
The global fashion industry is moving towards the decisive phase of digital adoption with growth in major countries across the globe. For B2C eCommerce, it is the largest contributor both by revenue and volume. Here's a quick overview of the global fashion industry.
If you have observed the stats shared in the section above, probable questions would be: How does fashion eCommerce account for growth and futuristic opportunity? What are the reasons why many aspiring entrepreneurs build a fashion eCommerce marketplace? Let's find the answers to these questions below.
Due to these numerous opportunities in the fashion eCommerce industry, entrepreneurs and business owners can tap into the untapped markets, increase their customer base, and ultimately increase profit margins.
However, the fashion eCommerce marketplace can be further segregated based on products like:
a. Clothing and Apparel:The clothing and apparel segment is the backbone of the fashion industry and covers all types of clothing items for men, women, and children. It offers a diverse range of products that cater to different demographics, styles, and occasions. From everyday casual wear and office attire to luxury couture and streetwear, this category thrives on fast-changing trends, seasonal shifts, and consumer preferences.
b. Shoes:The footwear segment is a high-demand category within the fashion industry, encompassing everything from casual sneakers and formal dress shoes to athletic footwear and specialized designs like orthopedic shoes. The revenue in this segment is anticipated to reach $156.74 billion by 2028, with the athletic footwear segment reflecting the fastest growth.
c. Accessories and Bags:Accessories and bags are essential fashion elements that enhance personal style and functionality. This category includes handbags, backpacks, belts, sunglasses, scarves, and hats, catering to both fashion-forward consumers and those seeking practical, everyday items.
d. Jewelry and Luxury items:This eCommerce segment comprises luxury goods like watches, jewelry, eyewear cosmetics, and fragrances. The luxury goods marketplaces have shown an upsurge during the last ten years. Revenue in the luxury goods industry is expected to amount to account for $33.03 billion by 2029.
Success for a fashion eCommerce marketplace does not just depend on the products on sale, rather, the overall shopping experience of the fashion eCommerce platform is equally important to engage users. Here we discuss the key trends and drivers that you can consider before you build a fashion eCommerce marketplace. These tips are ideas that top fashion eCommerce platform brands are already following to sustain revenue from their online fashion eCommerce marketplaces.
a. Personalization:Today, a significant proportion of total sales are generated via this channel of personal recommendations or promotions. Sending personalized messages, offers, and experiences has proved to increase revenue across the eCommerce industry.
So how does a fashion eCommerce business do it?
Whether the customer is new or returning, it is very important to know the following factors to get the personalization right:
This can be ascertained with the help of analytical data. Moreover, tracking user behavior through data has helped fashion eCommerce marketplaces build connections with users. This data can include purchasing history, browsing history, demographics, and psychographics. Such data gives the business a better analysis of its target audience. According to Statista, 19 percent of responding U.S. consumers said that personally relevant content significantly increased their purchase intent, with 59 percent saying that personalized content somewhat increased their intent to purchase.
If we get the analysis right, we can then focus on the kinds of personalization strategies we want to provide to the customers. Personalization in a fashion eCommerce marketplace can be:
b. Partnering with Influencers: In the past few years, the increased intertwining of social media in the lives of people has given rise to a novel marketing channel. Such a partnership allows fashion brands to connect with their target audience more authentically, leveraging the influencer's trust and influence to create meaningful relationships. In other words, this helps in giving the brand an audience that is already engaged with the influencer and helps in driving brand loyalty.
For instance, ASOS, a top online fashion eCommerce marketplace has featured stylist pages for influencers to provide the audience a glimpse of their favorite celebrities' styles & other inspirational tips.
c. User-Generated Content as Social Proof:A key pain point for eCommerce is trust. How does a business build trust with its consumers via digital channels? Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, neither is a buyer unable to see or meet the business nor can they hold the product in their hands before making a purchase. This is accentuated in the case of the fashion industry, where the look and feel of the product is an important aspect. The answer here lies with User Generated Content or UGC for short. A popular way to include this is via product reviews and ratings on your fashion eCommerce marketplace, allowing buyers to give their genuine opinions about the product.
We are witnessing a systematic shift in the commerce world. Emerging players are entering the market and gaining popularity over traditionally strong players like Amazon. Here are some popular fashion eCommerce marketplaces across the globe that have shown exponential growth over the last few years:
| Marketplace | Founded in | Headquarters | Annual Revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 1994 | United States | $637.959 billion |
| Zalando | 2008 | Germany | $11.6 billion |
| ASOS | 2000 | United Kingdom | $4.28 billion |
| Revolve | 2003 | United States | $1.17 billion |
| Dafiti | 2011 | Brazil | $633.3 million |
| Lamoda | 2011 | Russia | $265.7 million |
| Lyst | 2010 | United Kingdom | $35 million |
Like any other marketplace, a fashion eCommerce marketplace works similarly. Here's an overview of the functioning of such kind of fashion eCommerce marketplace:
Business owners can implement different commission rates for different products and for different sellers. A fashion eCommerce marketplace can charge a membership fee from the vendors to list their products on the platform in addition to the commission on every sale. Other than that, there can be secondary sources of revenue such as:
Here's a checklist that you must thoroughly analyze before you build an online fashion marketplace.
a. Product Catalog:The product catalog feature allows the owner/admin of the fashion eCommerce marketplace to control and manage as many catalogs as possible. The vendors select the product from the existing catalog and add it to their inventory and mention the pricing. The feature helps to enhance the overall experience of online shopping as the admin controls and optimizes the product images, descriptions, and specifications.
b. Payment Gateways: Payment Gateways play a significant role in the online retail environment as they are a safe and secure digital system to process payments. Payment gateways conform to safer payment transactions and safeguard against security issues. Multiple payment gateways make it easy for users to order products instantly from an online platform.
c. Analytics & Reporting:It is extremely important to review the performance of your fashion eCommerce marketplace. Based on the number, you can decide the future strategies and goals. Having a closer look at the visitor statistics, sales report, and traffic analysis helps you understand your customers & reduce marketing costs.
d. Seamless Product Management:If you aim to scale your business rapidly and want millions of products, your fashion eCommerce marketplace must have robust product management that easily allows the marketplace owner to manage the products.
e. Customizability: eCommerce is a dynamic ecosystem. Agility to respond to this change will warrant the use of customizable fashion eCommerce marketplace software. A future-ready solution is the answer, allowing you the flexibility to customize and scale the business as per the current/ongoing marketing scenarios.
f. Multicurrency:The biggest convenience of a multi-currency platform is easy accounting and global expansion. Billing the customers in their preferred currency unit improves their user experience on the platform.
Features that you need to consider for buyers of the fashion eCommerce marketplace:
a. Mobile Applications:Personalization is one of the major reasons why mobile apps are performing better than desktops. Mobile applications help buyers make purchases on the go and make them aware of real-time discounts and sales with push notifications. Mobile apps have been proven to increase customer engagement and retention. Adding mobile apps to your eCommerce strategy will help enhance the shopping experience for the buyers and increase your business reach.
b. Rewards and Discounts:Better prices are a pivotal leverage lever that eCommerce has used to attract consumers. In this, rewards and discounts is an effective marketing tool that can be used in a number of ways. These have been highly effective in encouraging customers to shop online and driving customer loyalty.
c. Responsive Layout:A well-optimized fashion eCommerce marketplace will bring more visitors and conversions. A responsive web design allows a seamless user experience across multiple devices. Ease of use, better site speed, and increased conversion rates are not the only reasons why responsive designs, search engines too favor responsive stores online.
d. Smart Recommendations:Including recommendations as a part of the user experience has helped in increasing the Average Order Value (AOV). Displaying a list of suggested products based on the browsing history helps in personalizing the user shopping experience and therefore increasing the conversion rate of your fashion eCommerce marketplace.
e. Streamlined Checkout: A streamlined checkout process is directly linked with the conversion rate for an eCommerce marketplace.
Turnkey fashion eCommerce marketplace software provides an easy approach to build a fashion eCommerce marketplace. While there are several solutions available that allow you to build an eCommerce marketplace. They vary greatly on a number of parameters. Moreover, as discussed above ― fashion eCommerce marketplaces will need purpose-driven features to drive success in a competitive eCommerce sphere. So, instead of quickly choosing the easiest and cheapest option, try to answer the following questions in your mind.
One option is going for SaaS solutions, which are actually subscription-based software. By paying a monthly or yearly subscription, SaaS users have access to the pre-designed themes, plugins, modules, templates and add-ons that allow users to customize their storefront.
However, the monthly/yearly recurring subscription cost increases the total ownership cost to a huge extent. Moreover, issues such as identity and access management need to be addressed before trusting any third-party service providers. If this is not enough, software running on a remote server often lacks in performance when compared to the on-premise one.
The other option is a self-hosted fashion eCommerce marketplace software offering complete control over the source code, thus allowing for complete customization. The upfront purchasing cost may seem a bit more than the SaaS. However, the total ownership cost is much lower in the long run. The readymade solutions also offer the ability to start small and scale the businesses in the future to accommodate the growing needs.
One such complete fashion eCommerce marketplace software is Yo!Kart that has all the benefits associated with a readymade customizable solution. Flexible hosting, lower cost of ownership, faster go-to-market time, along with platform-wide APIs, and integration with external applications and services make it an ideal fashion eCommerce marketplace software.
Yo!Kart has powered around 5000+ marketplaces, which also includes several fashion eCommerce marketplaces like:
To conclude, hope you have gained sufficient information to build a fashion eCommerce marketplace for multivendor operations. With an upward trend and numerous successful business models, starting an online business can be an easy recipe for success. You need to understand the market and should effectively leverage the above-mentioned information that will help you build a strong fashion eCommerce marketplace that can thrive in the market.
And lastly, when backed by the perfect fashion eCommerce marketplace software like Yo!Kart and a strong business plan, there's never been a better time to bring your clothing store dreams to life.
Yes, Yo!Kart is a white-label solution that provides the majority of eCommerce features a fashion marketplace would need.
Can I launch mobile apps for my fashion eCommerce marketplace?Yes, Yo!Kart offers customer-centric buyer mobile apps for both Android and iOS that provide a seamless shopping experience to customers.
Yes, our fashion eCommerce marketplace software is fully customizable and can be customized as per your unique business requirements.
The cost of building a fashion eCommerce marketplace depends on the development approach you decide on. If you choose to develop the platform from scratch, the cost of the platform will be very high. However, the starting cost of building a fashion eCommerce marketplace with a readymade solution like Yo!Kart will be $499, which may vary in case of any customizations or other unique requirements.
Building a fashion eCommerce marketplace with Yo!Kart may take up to 5-7 business days. However, this timeframe may vary in case of any customizations.
