Build An Online Clothing Store With Customer Centric Features & Maximize Conversions

Based on a survey conducted by a popular website, it was found that amongst online purchases in countries like U.K, U.S.A, China, Russia, Spain, India, Turkey and Mexico, clothing products have been the most sought after. This is definitely great news to eCommerce clothing store owners. But with new online clothing websites sprouting every minute, it is very tough to gain a competitive advantage.

As a result, shopping owners are willing to tread the extra mile in order to clamp their customers through daily deals, coupons, etc. But offering discounts alone won’t win you customers. It is all about making your online boutique store adaptive to the changing eCommerce dynamics. Now let me stop beating around the bush. To all existing and yet to become online store owners, this post is an earnest attempt to emphasize the importance of hiring the services of a professional eCommerce development firm to create your online clothing store.

Uncomplicated Customization

The community edition of Magento is free to use, flexible and very easy to customize. However expertise in PHP and Zend framework is required to integrate Magento extensions with your online clothing store and customize it to suit your business requirements. However the back-end operations are unambiguous and do not require any technical proficiency.

Conversions Driven Features

Converting a visitor in to a customer is a big challenge and that is a very important aspect you need to focus on while building your online clothing store. Nevertheless, Magento has indigenous features and extensions that are customer centric and has the ability to spike up your online clothing store’s conversion rates.

Simplifies Registration and checkout process

The complex registration process, which requires a barrage of details like name, age, mail-id, etc., gets simplified when you integrate the social login extension with your clothing site. This extension enables customers to register and sign in using their social networking accounts (Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc.). Altogether there are 18 social networking services supported by this extension. Similarly, the one step checkout extension minimizes the lengthy registration form in to a single page.

Supports multiple Payment gateways

The flexibility of Magento makes it simple to integrate a battery of top quality payment gateways with your boutique website. It supports over 50 payment gateways with PayPal, Authorize.net, Google checkout, Braintree, Sage Pay, Amazon Payments, WePay and Dwolla being some of them.

Supports multiple languages

Magento offers you the facility of making your online boutique shop multilingual and helps you reach out to customers from different regions. The language translation process is very simple. You can download the language pack from Magento commerce site. Once you are done, you can choose the language you desire to have on your boutique site. For a better insight go through this how to make your site multilingual.

Reduces Shopping cart abandonment

Customers might have added a product to shopping cart and logged out without purchasing it. On such occasions, this eCommerce platform offers a provision to send pending order notifications, thereby reminding customers about the products added on cart but not purchased. By this way you will be able to reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Effortless Product Management Options For Admin

Magento is one of the few platforms that are admin-centric. It gives admin the option of uploading simple, virtual, grouped, bundled, configurable and downloadable products. The back-end operations are very simple and less time consuming. Let us see what it has in store for the admin.

No limitations on product upload

As Magento is a scalable platform you can upload any number of products to your boutique website from the back-end. It also allows the admin to upload thousands of products at one stretch. Further admin gets the choice of uploading multiple images for a single product so as to portray a product in different angles.

Product management made easy

In an online boutique store, key attributes like price, quantity and stock availability status of clothes keep on changing. So it becomes a tedious process for the admin to update the products individually. In Magento, ‘Manage products’ option, saves the admin’s precious time by facilitating product edits in bulk.

Facility to create configurable products

Configurable products are the ones with minor variations clubbed under a common category. For instance a t-shirt that comes in different sizes like L, M and S can be categorized under single product and customers can select the appropriate size from the drop down menu. Configurable products help in keeping your clothing store tidy. Magento allows you to create configurable products for your clothing website.

Gives control over customer reviews

Extensions like reviews and ratings when embedded to your online boutique shop, enables your customers to post their genuine feedback and rate the products as well. However these reviews get posted only after the admin approves. Admin also has the option of modifying customer reviews at the backend.

Enables Mobile App Creation

With 60% of online traffic coming from mobile phones, developing a mobile app for your boutique site is a must in today’s eCommerce world. In fact seeing the trend, online clothing giant Myntra has shut down its website and moved all its operations to mobile app. If you wish to follow suit, you can do so because Magento gives you the leeway to build a shopping cart app exclusively for your online clothing store. Further as it allows you to synchronize your app’s database with Magento database, the tasks executed in the website back-end gets updated instantly on your mobile app.

Lets You Create an On-demand Delivery App

Handling delivery duties forms the base for order fulfillment. If you build an on demand delivery app for your ecommerce store it can help in delegating delivery work, track products that are being dispatched right from the warehouse to the doorsteps of customers.

These delivery tracking apps usually work with technologies like geolocation, GPS and seek aid from Google Places etc. On demand delivery apps can be of use to deliverers to navigate their way to the delivery destination. For customers, it helps them know where their products are.

Using Magento, you can get this feature integrated within the mobile shopping app you have built for your ecommerce store.

Loading Speed Optimization Techniques

Your clothing store’s speed tends to decelerate over a period of time. Magento has a trove of speed optimizing options at the backend. An ensemble of HTTP requests stunts a website’s loading speed. These requests can be reduced by combing the JavaScript and CSS files separately. From the admin panel you can merge these files and keep the HTTP requests in check. You can also make use of the default cache system available in the Magento backend. There are many such Magento speed optimization techniques similar to these and the highlighting aspect is that the admin need not possess any technical expertise to implement them from the backend.

Layered Security Options

Safeguarding your customer’s credit/debit card credentials will be pivotal to create a trust factor. You can be rest assured of your online boutique store’s security as Magento gives you the option of using a secure URL and conducting transactions on HTTPS/SSL URL, thereby preventing account spoofing, DDOS attacks, etc.

Adequate Purview For Product Marketing

Magento is a search engine friendly platform. Therefore it makes SEO’s job simpler by improving your online clothing shop’s ranking prospects in the organic search results. Let us see the contribution of this eCommerce platform from a marketing perspective.

SEO- friendly URLs

It lets you create a search engine friendly canonical and redirect URLs for your clothing site and gives you the liberty of inserting keywords while creating meta tags for product pages and their respective categories.

Generates sitemap.xml

Magento dynamically generates an xml sitemap, whenever you create a new URL in your online clothing site. The privacy settings enable you to prohibit anonymous users from viewing your sitemap details.

Enables email marketing

This eCommerce platform gives you the option of sending transactional mails and newsletters to your customers. These mails and newsletters have been made responsive. Hence customers won’t encounter any hassle while viewing mails through their mobile devices.

Allows social media integration

Using social share plug-in in Magento, you can append social buttons to your online boutique shop. This plug-in gives customers the option of sharing products in their social networking site, thereby magnifying the reach of your clothing products.

Products can be sold on Facebook

Using Magento Facebook Store extension, you can import your eCommerce store to your official Facebook page. So when you post a new product on your page it automatically appears on your customer’s feed and they can purchase their favorite products directly on Facebook without navigating to your boutique site.