Best E-commerce Practices to Sell Apparel on B2C Marketplaces

Indian e-commerce is growing at a whooping annual rate of 51%, turning out to be the highest revenue holder in the world. The size of e-commerce apparel industry is leading its way to glory. No wonder ALL, we mean it, ALL the big brands are adapting to this e-commerce model that only promises to become more popular in the upcoming years. These market places are majorly driven by multi-vendors that can also fulfil the huge demand-supply gap, thus, solidifying the growth and online presence. 

E-commerce will play an important role in the Indian government’s vision of ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ (self-reliant India) as more home-grown brands boost their sale and go global, aiding digital infrastructure. Which are these marketplaces for Indian apparel industry? 

1. Amazon India

When you think of clothing, Amazon has now become the preferred choice for every Indian buyer now. Driven by over 70% of online shoppers, Amazon is estimated to have 322.54 million monthly visitors. Amazon India has already facilitated $2 billion in exports for sellers through its global selling program (in accordance with self-reliant India programmer) and has now set a bigger goal. Indian apparel ecosystem needed a built-up with a sophisticated digital infrastructure and seller base, offering the best-in-class customer experience. Amazon fulfilled all these expectations, especially during the COVID phase. Over the next five years, Amazon aims to digitize 10 million SMBs, enable $10 billion of exports, and create one million jobs for Indians. 

2. Flipkart 

While e-commerce penetration had just initialized in India, Flipkart became India’s first and perhaps most successful e-commerce store. Started initially as a bookselling multi vendor store, Flipkart now sells almost everything just like Amazon. Flipkart’s estimated monthly visitor volume stands at 242.62 million. Flipkart has over 1,00,000 registered sellers on its multi vendor marketplace selling a variety of electronics, fashion, appliances, furniture, books and other stuff.

3. Snapdeal 

Back in 2010, Snapdeal started as a coupon and deals site and eventually turned into a varietal shopping platform with over 3,00,000 sellers and 30 million+ products. Snapdeal is being funded by big global investors like Softbank, Alibaba, etc. The estimated number of monthly visitors on their portal is 56.41 million. While electronics are the top-selling category, Snapdeal also sells a variety of other products like fashion, toys, beauty products, kitchen appliances etc.

4. Myntra

Myntra is another aboriginal customer-favorite ecommerce marketplace dealing in fashion, lifestyle and home-related products. It was acquired by Flipkart in 2014 and remains to be the top fashion destination for online shoppers in metros as well as tier 2 and tier 3 cities. The estimated number of Myntra’s monthly visitors is 48.03 million. Myntra has a huge sellers and distributors base that helps in stocking a range of products like menswear, womenswear, ethnic wear, kidswear, local and global brands in fashion. 

5. Shopclues 

Shopclues is another player that is well known for having an array of products like fashion, mobile and gadgets, sports, kitchen etc. It has over 50 million registered customers with 22 million monthly unique visitors. This multi vendor marketplace has over 6 lakh merchants and has over 28 million products. Recently it tied-up with ShemarooMe, a leading OTT video streaming service provider for offering digital streaming services.

B2C E-commerce Practices to Adapt for selling Apparel

• Offer a seamless user experience: An easy yet eye-appealing website design proves to be a hassle-free shopping experience. An easy-buying process from cart calls for shorter purchasing experience. 
• Payment gateway options: It should securely interface between an eCommerce website and a customer’s preferred mode of payment, which can be their bank account, credit card, debit card, gift card, or any online wallets. With multiple payment gateway options, customer purchasing experience becomes more relevant and nice. 
• Integrate inventory management system: One of the successes of e-commerce will be a faultless inventory management that stocks and delivers without any delays. B2C marketplace should have options for connecting to business systems like a CRM or an ERP as well to integrate Inventory in a real-time system.   
• Offer a continuous customer support service: Integrating a multiple communication channel for customers such as social networking is one of the best ways to reach a potential customer. B2C marketplace should enable customers to actively converse with clients and prospects regardless of where they will be buying apparel or not. These interactions include alerts such as waiting orders and orders confirmation. Moreover, as consumers tend to pay great attention to reviews a new trend in the B2B space is to allow comments on their platforms.
• Attract potential customers with exciting offers: A new way of selling products is to offer discount coupons to customers like first-time user discount, festival discounts, birthday or anniversary discounts, etc. One of other tactic is to offer an influencer referral discount which is also called as influencer marketing.