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Build Fashion eCommerce Marketplace - Complete Guide

When planning to start an eCommerce business, you are surrounded by many questions like:

  • What are the best industries to invest in?
  • Which niche to select?
  • Which countries/regions will bring the maximum revenue?
  • How to gain a competitive advantage and maintain profitability?

eCommerce has shaped the global retail market. Today, eCommerce across multiple categories like fashion, electronics, food, etc., accounts for trillions of dollars of global sales and shows no signs of a downtrend. Our experts have performed an in-depth analysis and research on the online fashion and apparel market.

Read this guide to know the global perspective, opportunities, market leaders, trends, and checklist to start an online fashion marketplace.

Growth of the Fashion eCommerce Market

In 2023, the global online fashion market was valued at nearly 821 billion U.S. dollars. It is expected to surpass that figure by the end of 2024; in 2027, it could reach just over 1.2 trillion U.S. dollars. The reason behind the encouraging growth in this sector is the continuous progression of the eCommerce shopping experience offered by popular online fashion marketplaces, driven by innovation.

The global fashion industry is moving towards the decisive phase of digital adoption with growth in major countries across the globe. For B2C eCommerce, it is the largest contributor both by revenue and volume. Here's a quick overview of the global fashion market.

  • According to Statista, the revenue for online fashion is expected to significantly increase in all regions. Led by China with 229 billion U.S. dollars, followed by the United States with $ 143.9 bn and on the other end of the spectrum, trailed by Africa with 8.92 billion U.S. dollars and Indonesia with $ 5.5 bn.
  • Moreover, 50% of the consumers reported that they choose to shop from an online fashion marketplace because they find it more convenient to shop from the fashion eCommerce platform than traveling to the store to shop.

Opportunities For An Online Fashion Marketplace

If you have observed the stats shared in the section above, probable questions would be: Why does fashion eCommerce account for growth and futuristic opportunity? What are the reasons that make many aspiring entrepreneurs build a fashion marketplace? Let's find the answers to these questions below.

  • Lower digital barriers of entry encourage clothing retailers to sell clothing and fashion items across the globe
  • The emerging worldwide population with disposable income has been another contributing factor to this industry.
  • Personalization is a leading factor and people love to receive personalized offers and messages from their preferred brands. Personalization has been signified as a defining element to present and future success. By tracking user behaviour, online fashion marketplaces Commerce have been able to target customers more accurately, hence winning more sales
  • Mobile Applications have succeeded in engaging customers at any time from any place. There is a growing pervasiveness among entrepreneurs to capture the growing adoption of mobile phones by users. So when they build online marketplace, offering eCommerce Mobile applications is an important consideration. This helps them to allow their sellers to reinvigorate stale sales from their offline stores, thus creating a better experience for the users.
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Due to these numerous opportunities in the fashion eCommerce industry, entrepreneurs and business owners can tap the untapped markets, increase their customer base, and ultimately increase profit margins. The fashion eCommerce industry can be further segregated based on products like

Clothing and Apparel:The eCommerce market segment for Apparel covers all types of clothing items for men, women, and children. The revenue in this segment is expected to show an annual growth rate of 11.90% from 2024 to 2027, resulting in a projected market volume of US$12,470.00m by 2027.

The number of users in this segment is expected to amount to 395.0m users by 2027. User penetration is expected to hit 26.9% by 2027 and the average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to amount to US$25.48.

Shoes:The shoe niche in the fashion eCommerce industry offers vast opportunities for retailers, including high demand, diverse styles, and global reach.Revenue in this segment is expected to show an annual growth rate of 10.28% from 2024 to 2027, resulting in a projected market volume of US$192.80bn by 2027.

In the Footwear segment, the number of users is expected to amount to 2,994.8m users by 2027. User penetration is expected to hit 37.7% by 2027. The average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to amount to US$56.85.

Accessories and Bags:The eCommerce market for the Bags & Accessories segment is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14.7% from 2024 to 2028.

Jewelry and Luxury items:This eCommerce segment comprises luxury goods like watches, jewelry, eyewear cosmetics, and fragrances. The luxury goods marketplaces have shown an upsurge during the last ten years. Revenue in the Luxury Goods is expected to amount to US$368.90bn in 2024. The market is expected to grow annually by 5.40% between 2024 and 2027.

Leading Online Fashion Platforms

We are witnessing a systematic shift in the commerce world. Newer players are entering the market and gaining popularity over traditionally strong players like Amazon. Here are some of the market leaders in the fashion industry across the globe that have shown exponential growth over the last few years.

Sr.NoNameRegion/CountryVisitors per Month
1ZalandoEurope119.0M
2ASOSGlobal76.3M
4DafitiSouth America30.5M
5LamodaRussia16.1M

Business Model For The Online Fashion & Apparel Marketplace

Like any other marketplace, the online fashion marketplace works similarly. Here's an overview of the functioning of such kind of online fashion marketplace:

  • The buyer logins/registers on the website.
  • The vendor/seller lists products on the website.
  • The buyer searches and filters products according to his preferences and makes the payment for the product bought.
  • The seller receives the order request and delivers the product to the buyer’s registered delivery address.
  • As for how the business makes money, the admin/owner of the marketplace earns money through the commission and seller membership fee.

Business owners can implement different commission rates for different products and for different sellers. A fashion eCommerce marketplace can charge a membership fee for opening the online store in addition to the commission on every sale. There can be secondary sources of revenue such as

  • On-site promotions for the sellers
  • Banner Ads

Important Features For An Online Fashion Marketplace

Here's a checklist that you must thoroughly analyze before you build an online fashion marketplace.

Product Catalog:The product catalog feature allows the owner/admin of the fashion eCommerce platform to control and manage as many catalogs as possible. The vendors select the product from the existing catalog and add it to their inventory and mention the pricing. The feature helps to enhance the overall experience of online shopping as the admin controls and optimizes the product images, descriptions, and specifications.

Payment Gateways: Payment Gateways play a significant role in the online retail environment as they are a safe and secure digital system to process payments. Payment gateways conform to safer payment transactions and safeguard against security issues. Multiple payment gateways make it easy for users to order products instantly online.

Analytics & Reporting:It is extremely important to review the performance of your marketplace. Based on the number, you can decide the future strategies and goals. Having a close look at the visitor statistics, sales report, and traffic analysis helps you understand your customers & reduce marketing costs.

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Seamless Product Management:If you aim to scale your business rapidly and want millions of products, your fashion platform must have robust product management that easily allows the marketplace owner to manage the products.

Customizability: eCommerce is a dynamic ecosystem. Agility to respond to this change will warrant the use of a customizable fashion eCommerce solution. A future-ready solution is the answer, allowing you the flexibility to customize and scale the business as per the current/ongoing marketing scenarios.

Multicurrency:The biggest convenience of a multi-currency platform is easy accounting and global expansion. Billing the customers in their preferred currency unit improves their user experience on the platform.

Features for buyers

Features that you need to consider for buyers of the fashion eCommerce platform:

Mobile Applications:Personalization is one of the major reasons why mobile apps are performing better than desktops. Mobile applications help buyers to make purchases on the go and make them aware of real-time discounts and sales. Mobile apps have been proven to increase customer engagement and retention. Adding mobile apps to your eCommerce strategy will help enhance the shopping experience for the buyers and increase your business reach.

Rewards and Discounts: Better prices are a pivotal leverage lever that eCommerce has used to attract consumers. In this, Rewards and discounts is an effective marketing tool that can be used in a number of ways. These have been highly effective in encouraging customers to shop online and driving customer loyalty.

Responsive Layout:A well-optimized website will bring more visitors and conversions. A responsive web design allows a seamless user experience across multiple devices. Ease of use, better site speed, and increased conversion rates are not the only reasons why responsive designs, search engines too favor responsive stores online.

Smart Recommendations:Including recommendations as a part of the user experience has helped in increasing the Average Order Value (AOV). Displaying a list of suggested products based on the browsing history helps in personalizing the user shopping experience and therefore increasing the conversion rate of your eCommerce store.

Streamlined Checkout:A streamlined checkout process is directly linked with the conversion rate for an eCommerce marketplace.

Features for Sellers

Features that you need to consider for sellers of the fashion eCommerce platform

Advertisements: Display advertisements on your online fashion website enable sellers to promote their product/shop. If sellers want to promote their shop as soon as they launch, banner advertisements are the best way to do it. In addition to these, sellers should also be able to run PPC campaigns to attract more visitors to their store or any featured product page.

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Robust Vendor Dashboard: A vendor's dashboard gives them full control over their selling operations in a multivendor marketplace. With an exclusive ecosystem, they can perform their roles with greater effect and efficiency.

Independent storefront: Your online fashion platform will be a collective ecosystem wherein the vendors will sell to the buyers. Hence it is important to offer the sellers a space on the marketplace to operate their sales. These are independent storefronts of microstores. This allows the vendors an exclusive space to list their products, promoting their brand identity.

Import/export feature: This feature allows vendors to easily import/export product files that contain product information. Since vendors usually sell their products on multiple platforms, it is very important that they are able to manage their inventory across multiple channels.

Tax Management:Manage and customize tax categories rates for the products. Sellers need to add the tax percentage; the product rate is adjusted accordingly.

Inventory Management:Ease of managing inventory via the seller's console. Get prompt notifications and emails whenever a product is out of stock, the product is shipped, etc.

How to Build Fashion Marketplace

Turnkey fashion ecommerce software provides an easy approach to build an eCommerce platform for fashion. While there are solution available that allow you to build an eCommerce marketplace. They vary greatly on a number of parameters. Moreover, as discussed above ― fashion eCommerce platforms will need purpose-driven features to drive success in a competitive eCommerce sphere. So, instead of quickly choosing the easiest and cheapest option, try to answer the following questions in your mind.

  • Will I require a lot of support or will a straightforward or hands-off platform be sufficient for my requirements?
  • Is my technical knowledge enough to do any kind of coding and build a fashion website?
  • What features do I want for my website like email marketing, SEO, domain name, SSL certificates, etc.?
  • How much can I afford to pay to build fashion website for my business? What would be the other costs such as additional add-ons, plugins, and themes?

One option is going for SaaS solutions, which are actually subscription-based software. These are built and maintained by the businesses offering these platforms themselves and are available for rent. By paying a monthly or yearly subscription, SaaS users have access to the pre-designed themes, plugins, modules, templates and add-ons that allow users to customize their storefront.

However, the monthly/yearly recurring subscription cost increases the total ownership cost to a huge extent. Moreover, issues such as identity and access management need to be addressed before trusting any third-party service providers. If this is not enough, software running on a remote server often lacks in performance when compared to the on-premise one.

The other option is a readymade fashion eCommerce software solution offering complete control over the source code, thus allowing for complete customization. The upfront purchasing cost may seem a bit more than the SaaS, however, the total ownership cost is much low in the long run. The readymade solutions also offer the ability to start small and scale the businesses at a later stage to accommodate the growing needs.

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One such complete fashion eCommerce solution is Yo!Kart that has all the benefits associated with a readymade customizable solution. On-premise hosting, lower cost of ownership, faster go-to-market time, along with platform-wide APIs, and integration with external applications and services make it an ideal fashion eCommerce software.

Yo!Kart has powered around 5000+ marketplaces, which include marketplaces like GoEthnyk, Mora Labels & Noor and Zafir ― which are eCommerce websites built for the fashion industry.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, hope you have gained sufficient information to build fashion eCommerce website for multivendor operations. With an upward trend and numerous successful business models, starting an online business can be an easy recipe for success. You need to understand the market and should effectively leverage the above-mentioned information that will help you in building a strong fashion marketplace platform that can survive well in the market.

And lastly, when backed by the perfect fashion eCommerce software like Yo!Kart and a strong business plan, there's never been a better time to bring your clothing store dreams to life.

FAQ

Is your fashion eCommerce software Whitelabel?

Yes, Yo!Kart is a white-label solution that provides the majority of eCommerce features a fashion marketplace would need.

Can I launch mobile apps for my fashion eCommerce marketplace?

Yes, Yo!Kart offers customer-centric buyer mobile apps for Android and iOS to provide a seamless shopping experience to customers.

Is your eCommerce fashion solution customizable?

Yes, our eCommerce fashion solution is fully customizable and can be customized as per business requirements.

What is the cost to build a fashion eCommerce platform?

The cost of building a fashion eCommerce platform depends on the approach you decide on. If you choose to develop the platform from scratch, the cost of the platform will be very high. The starting cost of building with a readymade solution like Yo!Kart will be $499 (Currently) and will vary as per the requirements.

How much time will it take to build online fashion marketplace?

Building an online fashion marketplace with the help of Yo!Kart will depend upon the customizations. With the GoQuick package, the marketplace can be built and launched within 5-7 days

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