Omnichannel in Fashion Industry – Benchmark study of European brands

Care to share?

We surveyed 40 eShops from 4 European countries: The UK, The Netherlands, Sweden and Germany for 16 Omnichannel Factors.

Customer Loyalty

Almost every fashion brand has some kind of loyalty programme. Only 5% (2) of benchmarked brands didn’t have any customer loyalty programme.

92,5% (37) of benchmarked brands have an online customer loyalty programme. Less than half (42,5%) of brands have an offline customer loyalty. Almost every brand that has both offline and online customer loyalty, link them together.

Social Media Importance

Our benchmarking studies have shown us that Social Media plays a big role in today’s fashion eCommerce. Every site that we benchmarked had at least one link to Social Media.

The most popular Social Media channel used by eCommerce sites is Facebook. 97,5% (39) of benchmarks had a link referencing to brand’s fan page. The second most popular social medium is Instagram. 80% (32) of sites have an Instagram account.

Divante

Snapchat is the least popular social medium among the five we checked. Only 7,5%(3) of eCommerce had a link referencing their Snapchat account. Still, Snapchat is gaining popularity so it’s very probable that it will become a viable social channel for fashion brands.

The most Social Media developed country in our scope of studies is the United Kingdom. Every brand that we checked have a Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook account and almost all of them have an Instagram account.

Store localization and online visibility of in-store inventory

Store localization is a very important feature for customers that prefer to do their shopping in-store. During our study we found out that the vast majority of sites (85%) had a function allowing customers to localize their nearest store.

Divante

On the other hand, only 32,5% of benchmarked sites have a function to check whether the product you’re interested in is available in-store.

Online and offline complaints

Using an online channel to take care of returns and complaints is becoming more popular in today’s life. 77,5% of benchmarked fashion brands support online complaints. Support of offline complaints is less advertised on brand’s websites. About 50% of brands support offline return & complaints.

It may come as a surprise that Germany is the least developed country in the case of online complaints. Only 40% of German eCommerce have the feature of online returns and complaints. Other benchmarked countries never went under 90% of checked sites.

Responsive Web Design and Mobile Applications

As our studies show, the vast majority of fashion eCommerce brands have some kind of mobile solution. Half (20) of benchmarked brands have a Responsive Website. 52,5% (21) of the checked brands developed an Mobile App linked to their business.

Divante

It is important to notice that within the benchmarked brands we can find those that don’t have either a Mobile App or Responsive Website. They make up 25% (10) of the benchmarked brands.

Leader of Omnichannel eCommerce

Our studies show that the United Kingdom is the place to look for Omnichannel benchmarks as the Netherlands finish with the highest amount of points scored. However, we have to notice that they are only 5 points ahead of the United Kingdom which ended up in second place.

You can download a full report from our website – Omnichannel in The Fashion Industry.

Published March 16, 2017