Improve the customer experience in your online store with size recommendation

With the Covid crisis, shopping “in real life”, in store, became difficult for consumers. Faced with that situation, clothing brands bet everything on their websites. Running an e-commerce store is good. Offering a high-quality customer experience on it is even better. For the enjoyment of your online shoppers, and for your revenue.

There are several ways to raise the standard of that customer experience in your online store and to take a “customer centric” approach. At Fitizzy, we offer one of them: our size recommendation solution.

Find out how a number of retail chains use it on their websites, and how the data produced by this technological innovation helps them better understand what their customers expect and improve their offering.

Over the past year, French shoppers have changed their buying habits considerably, largely because of social distancing rules. Many of them have moved their purchases online.

According to Fevad (the French federation of e-commerce and distance selling), online sales at store-based retailers grew in 2020: +29% in the third quarter of 2020. Fashion and clothing brands with an online presence rode that momentum, with growth of +17% over the same period.

The way people use e-commerce has certainly changed. But for that shift to last, the customer experience on offer has to improve, according to the “Online Shopping Trends” survey carried out by software company Adobe in partnership with Advanis in July 2020 among 1,001 French respondents.

The study highlights a number of obstacles along the online purchase journey:

• 42% of respondents say they had a neutral or negative shopping experience during and after the first lockdown.
• 44% of them point in particular to things going wrong on product pages.
• 37% identify problems with the payment page.

Beyond a poor experience, these friction points have “a direct impact on brands, because they drive potential customers away from their owned channels and create a strong preference for marketplaces”.

To keep customers loyal on their own websites, “brands must therefore invest in compelling shopping experiences”. Size recommendation is one of them: it reassures customers along their purchase journey.

Build a bond with your consumers by recommending sizes on their favourite clothes

In a “customer centric” approach, the watchword is “personalisation”. More than ever, the strength of the bond with the consumer at every touchpoint (before, during and after the purchase) is a key success factor.

Fitizzy has been seeing this for several years through its size recommendation solution. It is used by many ready-to-wear retailers such as Promod, Naf Naf, Celio, Tara Jarmon and Caroll.

On their e-commerce sites, and more precisely on their product pages, this recommendation plugin sits behind a “Find your size” call-to-action button.

1. When they click that button, the user is asked to enter a few pieces of information about their body shape.
2. That data is cross-referenced with the brand’s technical information in order to recommend the most accurate size for the garment they have chosen.

This solution brings you a whole range of benefits:

• It gives online shoppers confidence when they buy online – they worry less about getting the size wrong.
• It increases the basket value and the number of items.
• It reduces customer returns after an online order. One of the main reasons for a return is size: the shopper receives a product that does not fit (too small or too big) and wants to exchange it. Those exchanges, free for the consumer, are very expensive for the retailer (€8 to €15 per return). In 2018, a study showed that almost 1 French shopper in 2 had sent back a product bought online. Handling returns is a genuine logistics challenge for online retailers.
• At a time when the fashion industry is adapting to lockdowns, social distancing and the ban on fitting rooms, this e-commerce solution has driven online purchases and also click & collect.

This size recommendation plugin works with every e-commerce platform.

Gather data to better understand what your consumers expect

According to the study “The new economic models of fashion”, clothing retailers need to take the following three steps in order to “develop a robust data approach”:

• “Structure customer data: collect and expose it. Brands have to choose which data really matters and is worth using.
• Analyse the data and draw conclusions from it: you have to begin with simple statistical analyses of customer data before you can refine them.
• Act iteratively: taking action lets you measure results and adjust your operations accordingly. Data supports decision-making, and an iterative approach lets you run tests and then fine-tune. On the basis of those first analyses, it is therefore vital to turn the findings into concrete initiatives, which can then be adapted over time.”

Fitizzy’s size recommendation plugin answers all three of these points. It helps brands better understand their consumers’ needs and market trends.

This innovation does indeed make it possible to analyse several kinds of data:

• getting to know your customers better (their body shape),
• understanding how your products relate to different body shapes,
• page views,
• clicks on the call-to-action button,
• plugin openings,
• the content of the recommendation given,
• add to basket,
• purchase or basket abandonment.

Through a dedicated dashboard, every brand finds all of its data laid out as charts. These performance indicators can be used by its marketing department to improve the performance of its e-commerce site.

They can also be of real interest to its pattern makers, who can optimise new collections by analysing current morphological data.

That gives the brand a better grasp of what customers expect: size, shapes, tastes, price, and so on. It also allows it to anticipate trends.

It can therefore:

• personalise its communications further to build customer loyalty: by focusing on purchase frequency, the date of the last purchase and purchase value, the brand can roll out more targeted, personalised communications designed to retain customers and re-engage them at the right moment. Beware of hyper-personalisation, though, as it can have the opposite effect.
• make better investment decisions about which collections to produce, which initiatives to run, and so on.

You sell clothing, lingerie or footwear and you want to improve your online offering and give your consumers size recommendations. Do get in touch. Our experts will answer your questions and take you through a personalised demonstration of our solution.

Would you like to know more about our size recommendation solution?

Contact our team to find out more and to get a personalised demonstration.

Request a demo