E-COMMERCE: THE EVOLUTION
Are you ready to forget those endless galleries of identical still lifes? A brand-new digital revolution is transforming online shopping in the fashion industry, which is set to chalk up another 14.5% growth in 2017, according to the latest forecasts by the Ecommerce Foundation. With these figures, fashion is confirmed as the number one product sector sold on the Web. “Today, the most evolved e-commerce is exploiting the communicative strength of video, especially when it comes to luxury.” These are the words of Umberto Andreozzi, Head of Fashion&Luxury at Accenture Interactive. In Milan, this consulting firm recently inaugurated the Accenture Customer Innovation Network – a large hub that brings together startups, experts, universities and high-tech partners – to collaboratively imagine, explore, discover and develop new digital services in the retail, fashion and consumer-goods sectors.
“For the Larusmiani brand, we just created an interesting retail-innovation project that starts precisely from video commerce. Videos have the capacity to excite and involve view- ers, offering them an engaging experience that actually puts them in the mood to buy. To be effective in this context, a video must have two key features: it has to communicate a brand’s heritage, offering an immersive experience of a dreamlike lifestyle, but it must also give a practical description of how to wear or match a product. What we’ve created for Larusmiani, for example, works as follows. When you click directly on a product in the atmospheric video, you are taken to a clip that describes the item in detail. Only then can the people who are really interested in buying click on another link that takes them to the actual e-commerce page.”
However, video e-commerce isn’t the only innovation in the field of online sales. Digital shopping is increasingly taking place via apps, hence on tablets and smartphones where the social and sharing implications represent a crucial sales-boosting factor. The recently launched Lablaco Shop, for example, is a sort of “Spotify of fashion”. Or at least that’s how its founders Lorenzo Albrighi and Shih Yun Kuo like to define it. They first made a name for themselves about a year ago with the launch of Lablaco Give, a “circular economy” app that helps users to swap or give away clothes and accessories. “Lablaco Shop offers brands and designers a super-simplified way to sell their creations directly,” says Lorenzo. “Vendors as Juhree Erba, Arrabal or Skiim London build their own ‘store’ by following a few really straightforward guidelines – such as a white background with hi-res images – with a space for storytelling and multimedia contents, including videos. We don’t buy stock like the big e-commerce websites do. We just solve all the logistics prob- lems. We’re more of a social network than an online store. All the users have their own page with their own mood boards and stylistic choices. They can post a garment they’ve recently bought, and whoever sees it can click on it and buy it directly, without even going through the seller’s website.”
Personalisation is the other hot topic if we’re talking about new commerce. A growing number of e-shopping sites are proposing clothing items and accessories that can be tailored to the needs of individual consumers thanks to the choice of options, materials, fabrics and colours. Two examples in the field of start-ups include Zakeke and Else Corp, who presented their innovative cloud platforms a year ago. The former allows all e-commerce stores and merchants to integrate a full-spectrum product configurator into their systems, in 2D and 3D, offering their clients the possibility to personalise marketed products in “live time”. The latter, meanwhile, has created “virtual retail” software for 3D-simulated presentations and sales of high-quality, personalised, custom-made footwear and apparel. Ready for a whole new buying experience?