How to increase conversions for clothing brands on Shopify [2024]

E-commerce fashion brands, it’s time to strut your digital stuff. Whether you're selling high-fashion or streetwear, there’s one thing all brands agree on: conversion rates matter. In today’s fast-moving world, it’s not just about getting eyes on your site; it’s about turning those eyes into engaged, paying customers.

But how do you do it? Well, let's break it down.

As one of the UK's leading Shopify Plus agencies helping apparel and clothing brands increase conversions. We've analysed tonnes of data, implemented conversion rate optimisation and have completely transformed shopping experiences on Shopify.

Here's how you can increase conversions for your clothing brand on Shopify in 2024.

The Evolution of Consumer Behaviour for Clothing Brands

Remember when people spent hours traipsing around shopping centres - or for my US readers... Malls -, trying on everything from Chanel to Champion? Those days are (almost) behind us. With the rise of e-commerce, consumer behaviour has drastically shifted. In the UK alone, online sales now account for over 30% of total retail sales, and in the US, that figure sits at a comfy 23%. That means brands are increasingly battling it out in the digital space.

But what’s driving this shift? The fast-fashion giants like Shein and Temu have tapped into a demand for quick, affordable, and trendy pieces, available at the tap of a finger. Consumers now expect seamless, on-the-go shopping. If your store isn’t keeping up, you might find yourself falling behind.

We've been watching very closely what the likes of Shein and Temu are doing, I'll share some more interesting strategies about that later.

Fashion’s Many Faces: High Fashion, Streetwear, and Everything In Between

Fashion brands today aren’t a one-size-fits-all affair. Whether you’re in the business of luxury fashion, streetwear, or contemporary clothing, each has its own consumer behaviour, expectations, and, most importantly, unique conversion challenges.

• Luxury Fashion: With higher price points and longer consideration periods, luxury brands benefit from creating a personalised experience. Free returns, handwritten notes, and curated lookbooks can work wonders.
• Streetwear: This category thrives on hype and urgency. A countdown timer to an exclusive drop can drive major conversions.
• Lingerie: Intimacy and trust are key. Ensuring a discreet checkout process, clear size guides, and easy returns helps customers feel comfortable buying.
• Contemporary Clothing Brands: These brands typically cater to younger, eco-conscious consumers. Highlighting sustainability and offering transparent supply chain details can make all the difference.

Saving Money: Consolidating Your Shopify Apps

It’s easy for Shopify brands to get carried away with all the apps available — before you know it, you’re paying for five different tools that have crossovers and features that do the same thing. The key to keeping your costs low and your site lean? Consolidating your tech stack.

Shopify’s app ecosystem has grown to include tools that streamline processes for different types of fashion brands. Here are a few that stand out:

The best Shopify apps for fashion brands:

• Klaviyo is a given these days for driving conversions and keeping customers engaged, especially in the fashion space. If you're anything like me or the millions of other consumers out there, you'll have a few favourite clothing brands that you buy from. Running segmented Klaviyo campaigns as a clothing brand is one of the best ways to cut through the noise and drive conversions.

Using AI in your email marketing campaigns will not only save time but subsequently save money. Relevance and timing are really important when sending emails. If someone's looking for a new hoodie for the winter season just around the corner, they probably wouldn't buy from an email about T-Shirts.

The problem here is that most brands don't segment their data well. Using surveys and consumer research will help you shape and start to segment your data to send better campaigns.

Offer incentives for consumer feedback such as 5% - 10% off. Once you have the data on your customers, you can use AI and dynamic product feeds to deliver more relevant email campaigns.

• Smile Loyalty & Rewards on Shopify will help consumers in your funnel whilst giving them an incentive to share with their friends, giving them a reason to come back and shop to get those discounts.
• Klarna or Afterpay are usually a standard app to have on most Shopify stores these days. If you're a clothing brand aimed more towards the luxury market, offering customers a way to split their payments into affordable chunks or delay the payment until the end of the month. It also works well for brands that do limited releases.
• Product filter and search are now a standard part of most premium Shopify themes with Shopify 2.0. The search and filter functionality rivals some of the huge apps and gives consumers control over what they're currently looking for to complete their look. I'd recommend using the standard Shopify search and filter functionality and benchmarking the performance. Use Google Analytics to see how users and shopping and Hotjar to see where users are clicking most.
• Shop the look for fashion brands on Shopify will help drive average order value (AOV). We implemented this recently for one of our clients, massively contributing towards a 10% increase in conversion rate and a 35% increase in revenue.

Whilst you can use an app for a shop the look or wear with section, this only adds to your monthly app costs. Below is an example of one we custom-built for our client Wild Swans.

By consolidating apps, you save on monthly costs and avoid unnecessary complications. We've seen stores losing thousands due to spending on unnecessary apps. One way to decrease your app spend is by simply cross-referencing app features with others that you have installed and see if they offer the same or similar features.

If you're a small clothing brand on Shopify, working with a freelance developer can help you save costs over time, by custom developing the feature that you need. The cons to this are if you don't have any dev experience and something goes wrong, you may have to pay the dev again to fix any issues that may occur.

For bigger brands, working with a Shopify development agency to help build a custom shopping experience will save you so much time and money. The con here is that it will cost more as you are paying for the experience of an agency. Fortunately, if you're working with a trusted Shopify partner, they'll code the custom experience so that you can easily keep it updated without the guidance of a developer.

Customer Service That Converts: Turning Shoppers Into Brand Advocates

Customer service often gets overlooked. Most brands are focused on their Meta ads, ROAS and how many new users on the website are converting.

When in fact, if they just changed things up a little bit in the customer service department, they'll find that customers will order more, stay longer and even recommend their friends.

BUT HOW?! Well, I'm going to break this down really simply into some actionable points.

As Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman at Ogilvy said;

"people generally over-obsess over things that are immediately quantifiable" "Customer loyalty is much much slower to measure than for example conversion".

So, what does this quote and video actually mean? Customer service is as important as your latest collection. As an example, 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service.

Focussing on how you can better serve your customers rather than bringing in new ones will bring acquisition costs down by a significant amount, helping build brand and consumer trust.

Fashion brands that go the extra mile are the ones seeing repeat business. Luxury brands like Gucci and Burberry often include handwritten notes and personalised packaging to make their customers feel special. The problem is that these things aren't easily quantifiable by brands so they'd rather pump more spend into marketing because they can see a figure almost instantly.

• Personalised gifts in orders - Again, back to my point before, including a personal note or something you know about a customer that they may like as a little gesture can go such a long way.
• Free & easy returns - Depending on what type of apparel brand you are, most customers won't actually return items or try to exchange them, they'll just leave them in the back of the wardrobe or give them to a family member and shop with another brand. An app like Loop Returns will create a really easy - hands-off - returns process for you. This way customers can handle their own returns without having to speak to a chatbot or reach out on Instagram.

Another great feature about Loop returns is that you won't miss out on stock, or lose any sizes. It's all super simple and automated, both for the customer and the Shopify merchant.

Make Shopping Fun Again: The Power of a Well-Designed Shopify store

Designing your Shopify store for a seamless shopping experience is more important than ever. Shoppers are no longer interested in clunky, hard-to-navigate websites. They want ease, speed, and excitement. Look at platforms like Instagram and TikTok – both are built on a story-driven, easy-to-browse experience. Your Shopify store should embrace a similar vibe.

Fashion brands can take a cue from Instagram Stories by introducing Shop the Story features on product pages. Customers can view styled outfits, click on the items, and add them to their cart with minimal fuss. It’s a more engaging experience, particularly for visual-heavy categories like fashion.

One of my favourite examples of this that I've seen is Rihanna's brand, Fenty Beauty.

Another game-changer is offering a wishlist feature. It might seem simple, but enabling users to save their favourite pieces increases the likelihood they’ll return and convert. For streetwear brands, this could be particularly effective during exclusive drops.

Whilst these may seem very simplistic, the overall look and feel of your Shopify website should be within your brand guidelines and offer a simple, easy-to-shop experience.

Speeding Up the Checkout Process: Shopify’s One-Page Checkout

The quicker a customer can check out, the higher the conversion rate. This goes for everything on your website, if you can save a potential customer time, they'll be more likely to convert.

Shopify has introduced its one-page checkout, a lifesaver for busy shoppers. This isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s necessary. A staggering 70% of UK customers abandon their carts due to a complicated checkout process.

By trimming down the steps, offering guest checkout, and ensuring mobile optimisation, you can reduce cart abandonment rates.

How to implement a one-page checkout on Shopify

To enable one-page checkout on Shopify:

1. Log in to your Shopify admin panel?
2. Navigate to the Settings tab?
3. Click on Checkout?
4. Scroll down to the Order Processing section?
5. Toggle the switch next to Enable One Page Checkout to the On position?

How to speed up your Shopify store

On the subject of saving time, here's how you can make your Shopify store lightning-fast to keep users on your store longer, making them more likely to convert.

• Remove unnecessary apps: We already mentioned removing unnecessary apps. This can drastically improve your loading time. One thing to keep in mind though, when some apps are uninstalled, they can still leave code behind in your theme that will slow your website down. Work with a Shopify developer to remove the app properly to avoid leaving code behind.

Shein and Temu: How Fast Fashion is Shaping Consumer Behaviour

It’s impossible to talk about modern e-commerce without mentioning Shein and Temu. These fast-fashion giants are redefining how people shop. They’ve perfected the art of gamifying shopping with features like daily check-ins, flash sales, and limited-time offers.

While their approach may not align with every brand’s ethos (especially if you’re in the luxury space), there are still lessons to be learned.

• Clickable USPs in the header: Most visitors to your website will need some level of risk assurance before ordering. Especially if you're a clothing brand on Shopify, they may be finding an outfit for an upcoming event so making fast delivery and easy returns prominent on the site will reassure visitors.

Having them clickable also allows visitors to find out more about your policies, further reassuring them and giving them the option to navigate to different pages.

• Using commitments to build trust: Reassuring users is something Temu does very well. They know that most people who land on their website are first-time visitors, their strategy to push conversions is to instil trust.

• Make shopping easier on Shopify with categories: Another example of where Temu performs really well on the user experience side of things is by offering really easy shopping categories. Obviously, your clothing store is going to have a lot fewer products than Temu does, but breaking your collections down into different styles and sections and testing how you display that to your users can go a really long way.

Whilst a lot of brands out there don't agree with Temu's practices in other areas, they do a really good job of converting users and giving shoppers an easy experience when searching for products.

If you can shorten the time it takes for the end user to find what they're looking for, you have a much higher chance of converting them.

Granted, a lot of Teemu's success can be attributed to its low cost but we've identified what's currently working on e-commerce stores now, so you don't have to spend time doing the research yourself. Book a conversion rate optimisation audit for your store below to find out what's currently holding you back.

Some of our Shopify Clothing & Apparel Clients

Feel free to check out and take inspiration from some of our recent Shopify build and store migrations with clothing and apparel brands.

Children's clothing store sees 15% increase in conversions

Working with Sparkle in Pink, we unlocked a 15% increase in their conversion rate. With our Shopify CRO audit, we identified a number of areas that were slowing down the shopping experience for visitors.

With our CRO and code audit, we were able to take them from a site speed score of 7 to over 65, a huge improvement for their shoppers. This enabled visitors to find products much quicker but also resulted in a much healthier ROAS for their ads.

Our full website audit, led by our lead UX & UI designer Sarah, identified how we could increase conversion through a number of optimisations.?

Project details:

• New UX flows
• Design & Graphics
• Desktop & Mobile experience
• React Native mobile application development

Using AI to increase conversions on Shopify

Leveraging AI and machine learning, we built personalised product recommendations based on the user's browser history and preferences.

To further enhance user experience and functionality, we developed advanced search options, including voice and image search to make it easier for users to find a perfect outfit for their little ones.

Magento 2 to Shopify migration for leading UK clothing brand

Continental Textiles, a leading wholesale clothing company based in the UK, recently came to Rainy City to enhance its digital presence and operational efficiency.

The transformative journey included migrating from Magento 2 to Shopify, enhancing security measures, creating bespoke theme templates, integrating with Microsoft Dynamics, and improving the user experience.

Impressed by our successful track record in eCommerce transformation, Continental chose Rainy City to lead its digital evolution.

Recognising the specific needs of a wholesale clothing company, our agency aligned with Continental’s vision to enhance its online presence and streamline operations.

Objectives

Continental outlined the following key objectives for the project:

• Migration from Magento 2
• Enhanced security and reduced maintenance costs
• Bespoke theme templates with an editorial lookbook
• Integration of Microsoft Dynamics
• Faster load times and improved user journey

Final Stitch: Conversions Are King

At the end of the day, your Shopify store needs to offer more than just beautiful products — it needs to offer a seamless, enjoyable shopping experience. Whether you’re a luxury brand or a streetwear label, streamlining your tech stack, enhancing customer service, and embracing new shopping trends will keep you ahead of the curve.

And who knows? Your next product drop might just be the one that breaks the internet.

• Connect with me on LinkedIn - I'm sharing tonnes of value in my posts and through DMs, if you have quick questions about Shopify or want me to review your current landing page, send me a link.