Today I wanted to do a very quick video on The Anatomy of An Online clothing Store. Recently we worked with a clothing fashion label client of ours, and we, of course, we created their brand strategy, brand identity, their online shopping website, e-commerce, online store and social media campaigns and all that.
And I wanted to actually look through their website and wanted to discuss the critical elements of an online clothing store and how you can buy clothes online, at least, as far as a small business is concerned; or a clothing or fashion label that’s just taking off or being launched. So, let’s dive right in.
Home Page
Here’s the website, the homepage, and Lambeewear is the client. Actually, that’s Bill; that’s our client, that’s the owner of this clothing line. And, as the website opens we’ve got a ‘hero shot’ or the top section where we have a photo slider with images of the products.
In this case, Lambeewear has launched with hats as their primary products or the first line of products. And there is a story behind these products… how Bill came about with the idea of the different names for these hats and the history behind each hat, the design, the bows and so on and so forth.
So, here we have the slider which, of course, leads to other pages. Below that we got three different elements: one is, of course, the Lambeenie elements collection where you click on that and go to the store. Here is where Lambeewear will introduce new products; in this case, for this month or for this campaign, it’s bows. And then, of course, there’s the brand story.
Below that you’ve got the latest arrivals — clean, crisp, lot of white space. And it’s very important that the branding is consistent throughout the store. At the bottom of the page is where you have the latest news. Here it could be industry news, it could be company news, product news and so on and so forth. At the very bottom actually is a link to a music track that actually was created by the client’s son and it’s quite a nice song that… that’s actually… that can be bought on itunes also.
Anyway, going up. Right on the top we have some critical information. We’ve got the phone number, the email address, and the log in register and the cart. Coming to the menu, let’s go to the ‘About Us’ page. It’s a little bit of information about Lambeenie hats… there’s Bill, again.
You’ve got a photo gallery with photos of not only Bill and but also models wearing the hats, and the plan is that eventually you’d also have a gallery for customers’ pictures… customers who bought these hats and wearing them. So, here you’ve got really nice, clean… very effective way of showcasing the product with the gallery.
Online Store
Then, of course, you get to the store. The store front is, again, very neatly laid out. There’s no clutter as you’d see in many of the bigger brands and their online stores; you’d see a lot going on, but for small businesses, for a small online stores, who are just getting started, it’s always better to go with minimum of clutter on the store.
You want the products to take centre stage; you want them to attract the tension. Anyway, let’s click on one of these products. So, we get into the ‘Patsy D’Amatto Lambeenie Black’. Again, it’s a very clean layout. You’ve got a slide here, slider with the different angles of the product and you’ve got the size selection. Now, the thing… now what we did with this particular client is create a complex system of product hook-ups so that anyone who buys one of these hats also gets… ‘Designer bows included… and, actually, the customer can select which bow.
You can see here that the third bow, ‘designer bow 003’ has already been preselected. That’s because… that’s the bow you see on the main image… this one here, but, of course, somebody can select number 6 and you’ll see here that the image has changed, and there are three types of bows, so…pointed, round and flat, and the customer can select any of these.
So you can see that it’s very user-friendly kind of layout. And you can have any number of logic or options when you’re trying to bundle together products. Then, of course, you’ve got social media icons here. There’s a bit of additional information … the weight and the dimensions. Once again, ‘what’s included in the product’.
Shopping Cart & Checkout
So, let’s just move to another product, and then, I will actually go through the process of adding it to the cart. I’ll have a flat and I’ll add this product to the cart. Ok. So, now we’re taken to the shopping cart. Again, we’ve got a very clean layout, very simple. It shows the primary product; again, of course, repeated here for the sake of showing the attribute, that’s the size here, and the designer bow that’s included that I’ve selected, or in this case, it comes ‘default’.
Now, you can also calculate ‘shipping’. To do that, well, you can do that on ‘checkout’, but there’s also a way to actually do it on the ‘stock shopping cart’, so you can check out what the total is. Let’s say, I’m going to get the ship to New York, and I click on ‘up-date totals’. Right! As you can see the shipping has been updated. Now, what we’ve done is hooked-up this website with the client’s UPS Business Account. And these prices, these rates… the website contacts the UPS business account, the client’s UPS business accounts, and retrieves the shipping rates in real time.
So these are real time shipping rates. Let’s select ‘UPS Ground’. That’s about $12, and I don’t wanna pay $152, so which is the next to … for a hundred and twenty-four dollar product, but… Ok, let’s check out.
Right! So, you’ve come to the last part where… again very simple, very user-friendly… is where you can either pay using Paypal, credit card. You can also enter a coupon code here, and we’ve set up a coupon system for this client, and then you place an order. That’s it! Really simple.
Clothing Industry Blog
We’ve also created a blog for this client. Now, for a clothing company, for a fashion label, any kind of business a blog is very important to keep the website fresh and going. So, not much is going on this blog at the moment… we’ve just practically launched the website.
Let’s go to the ‘Contacts Page’. Again, very simple, very easy. There’s a ‘contact form’ here to send email; there’s address, phone number, and if you want to talk about returns or exchanges, there’s a link here.
Backend Product Management
That’s it, really. It’s a simple website, but very powerful, very integrated, and quite hassle-free. Let me show you how the ‘back-end’ works. Right. So, this is the back-end. Let me just remove that…Ok, this is the back-end, and you can see products are listed here.
Let’s just click on one of these to see how the products are created. Ok, this looks a little daunting, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very easy to use: you put the product description in here; you upload the gallery; you can add more images. There’s a media library, so, you can select images from here or you can simply upload them. You can also set a featured image, and you can enter product tags and so on and so forth. Very simple, really, to create a new product. And this is where the magic happens. We are bundling on the products, so, we’ve created a ‘composite product’.
With the composite product, of course, we have different sizing options, and then you have the designer bows. So, it’s a very easy way of setting up. You can also set up coupons: Christmas coupons. There are no coupons here, but easy to create a coupon. And, well, there was also orders and, you know, inventory. I don’t want to show that because this is a client’s website and it’s sensitive information, so I can’t really share that on this video, but suffice it to say that it’s very easy to set up and manage.
Hope you found this video useful. It just shows you some critical elements that you may need to think of in your own online store, especially if you are a clothing or a fashion brand.
And if you have any questions about this video or this particular project, just give me a call or ping me on social media, and I’ll be able to answer them for you. Also be sure to read this article on more tips on a success web commerce business. Another couple of useful articles would be how to launch your clothing line and how to market your clothing line.
