The global apparel market is mammoth, worth $1.69 trillion in the U.S. alone in 2016. It’s a huge pie, with thousands of hungry players angling for a slice. Established apparel brands not only contend with traditional competitors, they’re constantly looking over their shoulder to see the footsteps of scrappy startups ready to disrupt established business models. And did we mention Amazon?

Against this backdrop, it’s harder than ever to gain the attention and loyalty of apparel consumers. There’s a very good chance that what worked just 18 months ago may not work today.

And that is what the 2017 Fashion Shopping Focus Report is about. Salesforce Commerce Cloud platform gives us access to over two billion apparel shopping visits and 40 million transactions; armed with this data, we are able to analyze and discern what is happening in online apparel shopping today. This unique report includes benchmarks to help you gauge your own performance against your peers, and is broken down by luxury, general, and active apparel sectors as well as five geographical regions. It also explores two hot trends in digital commerce today – increased importance of Product Detail Pages and fast fashion – and features several innovative Commerce Cloud customers.

Here are just three of the insights in the 2017 Fashion Shopping Focus Report:

• Fashion shoppers skip search. Site search is a very important part of a comprehensive digital strategy. However, fashion shoppers are 33% less likely to utilize the search bar than non-fashion shoppers. But don’t hide those search bars just yet! Search still drives 20% of all revenue for the apparel segment. Consider UX design elements to highlight your search bar as well as AI implementations to improve product recommendations.
• Apparel spend is up. Shopper spend is the per-visit average amount spent by a shopper. Year over year spend in the apparel sector grew 13% to $2.85 per online visit. Conversely, other retail sectors saw digital spend shrink 4%. General apparel leads the fashion sector seeing an average of $3.14 spent per visit.
• Shopping is getting quicker. Fashion shoppers spend one minute longer per site visit overall when compared to other retail sectors. Even on mobile, where sessions tend to be shorter, apparel shoppers spend one minute longer on site than non-apparel shoppers. Nonetheless, site visit durations are getting shorter every year across all of retail. In fact, apparel visit duration decreased by 6%, and non-apparel visit durations decreased by 10% since last year. While the decline is less drastic for fashion retailers, a decline is still a decline, and apparel retailers will have to work hard to close the gap between a shopping session and a purchase.

All this and much, much more is covered in the 2017 Fashion Shopping Focus Report. Download it today!