Best practices for fashion and footwear stores

Clothing and shoes are bought to be worn, and online the shopper cannot try them on. That makes fit the question behind both hesitation before the order and returns after it. Fashion also has more variants than most categories. One product can come in ten sizes and five colours, and every combination needs to be shown and kept in stock accurately.

Conversion benchmarks reflect this. Dynamic Yield reports 2.77% for fashion, accessories and apparel globally, while IRP Commerce reports 1.62% for UK and Irish fashion stores. The spread is large, so compare yourself with your own history rather than either figure.

Baymard's apparel research found that 83% of desktop and 87% of mobile apparel sites do not provide sufficient sizing information, and in testing some shoppers who could not find the size guide guessed or gave up. Its recommended size guide covers the following:

Show every product on a person. Baymard found that 23% of sites still lack human-model images for apparel and accessories. Write the model's height and size under the image, and if you can, show the item on more than one body type.

Photograph every colour rather than recolouring one image, because colour is the most common thing shoppers check against the photo when the parcel arrives. Add close-ups of fabric, stitching, zips and soles. Those details answer the quality question that a shopper in a physical store would answer by touch.

Fashion is one of the categories where video earns its place on the product page. A few seconds of a model walking shows how fabric falls and moves, how a dress swings and how a shoe flexes, which no still image can do. Keep it short, silent by default and placed after the main image in the gallery.

Under the EU Textile Regulation, the fibre composition of a textile product must be clearly visible to the consumer before purchase, also when the purchase is made online. Write it on the product page in plain text, for example “95% organic cotton, 5% elastane”, not only on a photo of the label.

Care instructions are not covered by the same rule, but shoppers look for them, and they prevent complaints about shrinking or fading. Put them beside the composition.

Few things frustrate a fashion shopper more than finding the right item and then discovering their size is sold out. Put a size filter near the top of category pages, show which sizes are in stock, and on the product page mark sold-out sizes instead of hiding them. Offer a back-in-stock alert for the missing ones.

The NRF and Happy Returns estimate that 19.3% of online sales were returned in 2025, and fashion is one of the categories where fit drives many of those returns. Record a reason for every return and read them per product. When “runs small” keeps coming up, write it on the page: “Runs small. Choose one size up if you are between sizes.”

Reviews help in the same way. Let customers rate fit (too small, true to size, too large) and show the result next to the size selector.