The 8 Best Apps for Online Fashion Stores in 2018

1. Okendo: Product Review App

Product reviews are a great way of validating the quality of your products and therefore encouraging more of your website visitors to buy from your store. In fact, studies show that 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when shopping on a website that features customer reviews.

Okendo is a wonderful – and affordable – choice of app for this as it allows customers to rate different aspects of a product, such as the fit, the style and the quality of the material. This extra level of detail allows customers to make fully informed purchases from your website while increasing their trust in the transparency of your business.

Another useful feature of this app is that it allows buyers to upload photo and video reviews, increasing your levels of customer engagement by adding more attention-grabbing (and search engine friendly) content to your product pages.

2. Yotpo: Product Review App

This app works in a similar way to Okendo in that customers can rate different aspects of each clothing item and provide valuable marketing content that a professional advertising campaign simply cannot match in terms of honesty and relatability. You can then use this engaging user-generated content as a powerful marketing tool by sharing your happy customers’ reviews on your brand’s social media.

Moreover, Yotpo also has an in-built analytics tool which will notify you when there is a common theme in the reviews your customers are leaving on a certain product, helping you to better understand and serve your customer base. This means that if you are a larger fashion store and have multiple customers complaining about the same aspect of a particular item, Yotpo will flag this as an issue so that you are then able to fix the problem. The app will also highlight what consumers generally appreciate about each of your reviewed products, allowing you to market that aspect of the product to new customers as one of its key selling points.

3. Snapppt: Shoppable Lookbook App

Shoppable lookbooks are an extremely popular trend in the ecommerce fashion industry at the moment, and with 77% of consumers today stating that they are more influenced by authentic customer-focussed photos when shopping than by professional campaigns, it isn’t hard to see why shoppable Instagram feeds are becoming such a common feature of online retail stores.

Snapppt is one of the strongest choices on the shoppable lookbook app market, as it allows customers to browse through outfit inspirations on an Instagram feed embedded into your store’s homepage and instantly shop their favourite looks.

This gives you the opportunity to inspire visitors to your website to purchase items they may not have previously been planning to by marketing them in a fun and visually appealing way, therefore boosting your levels of customer engagement, the aesthetic appeal of your website and – most importantly – your sales.

4. The Product Upsell App

Upselling refers to providing customers with recommendations of product add-ons or items that are similar to but more expensive than what they are ordering with the aim of making a larger sale. This is a strong marketing technique which has been proven to actually work, as studies show that the process of upselling drives over 4% of sales compared to just 0.2% of sales driven by cross-sales tactics (such as ‘customers who bought this item also bought…’).

If you own an online clothing store in 2018, a good upsell app is therefore an absolute must-have when it comes to maximising the profitability of your ecommerce business.

This app by Bold Commerce will automatically upsell products to your customers at checkout and is well worth the investment for any fashion store manager looking to effortlessly optimise their conversion rate.

5. Crushpics: Image Compression App

While there are an abundance of positives to marketing your clothing products in a highly visual manner, the disadvantage of this is that loading a lot of high-quality images on your page can slow down your website significantly. As studies have shown that just a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions, this is clearly an issue that needs to be addressed.

The best way to combat this problem is to reduce the size of your images in order to decrease the total file weight of your store. Typically, we recommend compressing images by at least 30% but sometimes larger files can be downsized by as much as 90%, substantially improving your website’s speed and performance.

One of our favourite Shopify apps for compressing images is Crushpics. As this app is fully automated, any new product images or promotional material you add to your store will be compressed for you by default, saving your team a lot of time and effort while optimising the usability and appeal of your clothing store.

6. Searchanise: Product Search App

There’s nothing more frustrating than browsing a website and finding that one piece which would be absolutely perfect for you – but isn’t available in your size.

This experience can be really off-putting for potential customers, so encourage them to love visiting and buying from your website by helping them find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible – with minimal scrolling required.

The Searchanise app works to increase sales by giving the best search experience possible to customers and allowing them to filter products by size, price, colour, fit and collection.

The app also boasts some useful extra features as it collects and analyses customer data to predict which products people often buy together so that it can automatically suggest related products to shoppers, resulting in an enhanced user experience for your customers and more sales for you.

7. Walls: Integrated Social Feed App

Integrated social media feeds are ideal for marketing products on fashion stores as they give you the opportunity to increase the engaging visual content of your store by displaying eye-catching Instagram photos and also allow you to share important updates about sales, discounts and events directly to your homepage from your brand’s various social accounts.

The Walls app is a strong choice for integrating social media into your website as it collects and displays posts, photos and videos using your chosen hashtag from over 15 different social media platforms. It also allows you to pick which of your users’ content you would like to display, making it a safe way to incorporate carefully curated user-generated content into your store and increase your brand’s customer appeal and engagement.

8. Loyalty Lion: Customer Loyalty Program App

One of the biggest challenges facing online fashion brands today is standing out amongst such a large crowd of competitors. Of course, attracting new potential customers to your store is a hugely important goal in any good ecommerce strategy, but it is also crucial to create and maintain strong positive relationships with your existing customers as studies show that just a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase the average profit per customer by 25-100%.

The Loyalty Lion app offers a fully customised loyalty program which works seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices and rewards customers various not just for their purchases but also for product reviews, newsletter sign-ups, referrals and recommendations. Loyalty Lion is therefore well worth investing in if you are looking to sustainably increase your conversion rate, customer retention and the lifetime value of your customers.

Time to get started!

With all of this in mind, it’s time to begin integrating these apps into your online fashion store and setting your business up for ecommerce success.

At Swanky, our friendly team of Shopify Plus Experts are more than happy to provide optimisation, marketing and website design advice and services for ecommerce stores of any size. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you are interested in finding out more.