What really makes one fashion ecommerce site different than another? Or even from a retail store? Any examples of successes?

Fashion's a vague and dynamic term. Hence the factors for success in fashion ecommerce are just as vague and dynamic. For a giant like Amazon, who may prefer to cater to a larger audience, the factor for success would be to provide an appealing shopping experience with the right range of products; not in a common interface, but one for every type of shopper; yet hiding the complexity in doing so. Brands like stylemarks GmbH, http://www.stylemarks.de, which focus on providing a platform to young and upcoming designers in Germany; aim to provide a convenient shopping experience where one discovers unique products from one of world's fashion centers.

Curation: Amazon may have millions of items to choose from, but, at least until you've established a buying record, it won't be able to give you a well-targeted, limited selection of RELEVANT content. Even once it has learned your tastes, if your e-commerce store offers distinctive tools or a great, exclusive feeling, people may prefer to come to you.

This article may be helpful: http://www.sramanamitra.com/2014/02/12/online-fashion-a-venture-scale-opportunity-that-silicon-valley-does-not-understand/ Fashion is a HUGE industry. The global women’s clothing industry, just a piece of it, is expected to exceed $621 billion in 2014. How many industries do you know of that scale? Yet, online, fashion has still relatively a small presence. In this article, I will explain why, and how to unlock the potential of this enormous industry using the strategies and tactics of Silicon Valley. Let’s start with a vision of what the online fashion industry ought to look like. Going back to my http://www.sramanamitra.com/2007/02/14/web-30-4c-p-vs/, what I want the web to become is my own personal shopper who curates my own personal store that is customized to my taste, my size, my budget. Full disclosure, I started one of the first online fashion companies, Uuma, with precisely this vision in 1999. The same year, we received an acquisition offer from Ralph Lauren, but chose not to sell. In early 2000, the dotcom crash also crashed with it that venture. We were way too early. But I am surprised that after 15 years, that vision still has not been realized. In March 2011, I gave an http://www.businessoffashion.com/2011/03/the-long-view-sramana-mitra-on-web-3-0-and-the-science-of-personalised-shopping.html that discusses some of what is still missing. I have thought a lot about why the industry hasn’t taken off online. (It seems, http://abovethecrowd.com/2013/10/17/stitch-fix-reinventing-retail-through-personalization/.) If I synthesize what I see is the core issue with online fashion, it is that entrepreneurs are thinking of the industry as a distribution channel a la Amazon, with price being the core differentiator. This is a gigantic mistake. Flash sales sites like Vente-Privee and Gilt Groupe focus squarely on price. Other experiments are in social media. Polyvore is a Pinterest like social media site where people put outfits together. It’s a toy, although, their bet is that they will make affiliate commissions in the range of 10-15% from the overall online fashion e-commerce industry, which isn’t a bad bet. It has brought them investment from Benchmark. The closest to what I would like to see, although it has no visual merchandising, is also a Benchmark company called Stitch Fix that sends a personalized selection of items to people’s homes. Customers can pay for what they keep, and return the rest. I don’t like this one, because I don’t want things to be sent over that I have not had a chance to see online first. The logistics of return, to me, are not attractive. To give you a flavor of what could be, a high-end consumer of women’s fashion has a very big annual budget for clothes and accessories. The actual number can be well above $10,000. It is not price that drives this consumer segment. It is design, style, fit, the experience of shopping, discovering interesting new designers, and regularly checking the works of their favorite designers. A personal shopping/store site that can create a compelling user experience for this category could win, say, 20% of the wallet share of this consumer. At $2000 annual spending level, the site would only need 100,000 customers to reach $200 million in revenue. There are very few consumer industries that have the potential of that level of growth with that few customers, which makes it a venture scale opportunity. We’ll call this a Personalized SAKS Fifth Avenue. So what is the secret of such a site? Why doesn’t it exist yet? In my opinion, to achieve the full potential of such a site, we need an entrepreneur team who understands Fashion at sufficient depth, as well as Computer Science at sufficient depth. Understanding Fashion means understanding design, merchandising, and marketing of fashion. Understanding Computer Science means understanding expert systems and machine learning to be able to create a software engine that can really get to know each customer, and merchandise to that taste, dynamically create a well designed personal store that showcases that merchandise, and consistently buy products from designers who cater to that taste. Further, this basic concept could also be applied to a specific designer who designs and markets a new line with some of the same principles as above. Instead of a personalized SAKS that carries multiple designers, we could also look at the opportunities to develop a personalized Ralph Lauren or Donna Karan. This would mean, Silicon Valley will need to start funding new design houses, which it has absolutely no clue how to do. http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/28/the-rise-and-future-of-the-new-york-startup-ecosystem/. To some extent, that is true. So do London, Paris, and Milan. On the design, marketing, merchandising aspects, yes, there is a basic understanding. However, how to translate that understanding into technology is serious computer science. That knowledge doesn’t exist anywhere else to that extent except in Silicon Valley. And that tells me, it is time for the Valley to wake up, and start exploring these opportunities. There’s not one, not two, not five, but hundreds of very large global companies to be built in online fashion. And we haven’t even started!

Hi! I think there are a lot of ways that e-commerce sites can be differentiated! For instance - regardless of what Amazon has to offer, I highly doubt any loyal customers from net-a-porter would even think to switch to Amazon. Overall, I think its about just defining the market youre in. Thats the problem that Amazon will face, that it won't be able to cater to a niche, being what it is. Another great example would be in this article: http://fashionbi.com/newspaper/luxury-e-commerce-growth-in-china-and-the-bundshop. In China, the e-commerce sector is driven 90% by a company called Taobao, but despite this, a lot of small online retailers are popping up, and still earning a significant amount from the market. While obviously these niche markets will never get as much market share, as Amazon and Taobao, one look at their sites will speaks loads about how they are able to be different.

In our point of view, the real differentiator is the customer experience, but in a brand new yet rudimentary way: Let the customers 'experience' the garments as realistically as never before in fashion ecommerce, by showing products in real time with technology like Google Glass. This is what can really make a difference...Please see our thoughts: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/article/20141106091935-42017943-want-to-regain-the-human-touch-forget-that-you-are-an-online-retailer?trk=prof-post