Today, every brand has a website. They have a web presence of some sort. I believe your website should provide precisely what your customers, or tribe, are looking for.

Many businesses use e-commerce. However, the internet is a bit more educational. You can buy clothes on the web, but first, let us tell you about ourselves. We’ll show you how we sustainably make our products.

It becomes a component of marketing and romancing the customer with who you are and how you conduct business. Nobody wants to be more than a few mouse clicks away from making a purchase. You must make it simple and easy to use.

I believe that user-friendliness is the key. A lot of really high-end corporations, in my opinion, are really good at making attractive visuals. You go to the site, and it’s absolutely stunning, and it perfectly captures the look they’re after. However, if you can’t easily navigate from item to item or see the product’s information, you’ll discover abandoned carts more often than not. Alternatively, they could have simply given up and departed.

We’ve witnessed significant growth in online shopping. Even those I would never expect to embrace e-commerce, such as my parents and people in their eighties, have acclimated to it, and everyone is doing it this way. You’ll want to make sure that your website is simple to use however you put yourself out there.

Social media is a world itself. But it also infiltrates the world we live in. I remember 2011 when Instagram first hit the social media scene—it was just a platform you could upload photos to. Who was looking at them? No one really knew. You were following people, but not really following them. Not many brands were on Instagram then, but now, the platform transformed into a marketplace from which you can now gain revenue.
It’s gone from uploading stagnant photographs, to now. Transactions can occur from uploading a single post. It’s phenomenal what Instagram has turned into. It’s changed the way people consume. People don’t just want to see your runway anymore, and say, “Oh, well, I guess I have to wait six months to buy that product, right?” Now, people are like, “I see it, I need to click it and purchase it right then and there, otherwise I’m gonna forget about it.”
Retail channels have become more open in terms of apps. For example, on Instagram, people can click the View Shop option and view the products you are selling, which leads them directly to the website where they can purchase the items. It’s a very easy process. In terms of conversion, I think that you know that our clients either go directly to the website, or we have private clients that buy from us through Far Fetch.
However, I think one of the most important things is to have accessibility. Therefore, the View Shop on Instagram is ideal for me. If someone wants to buy through there, great! It’s about that extra level of accessibility to maximize sales in the e-commerce industry.

Retail experienced a seismic during the onset of e-commerce. Many people claimed that wholesale was dead, that people were going to open their own stores. Why would you sell? The benefit of selling to a wholesaler is that you can take your product, sell it to them, and don’t have to worry about the product again, right? If it doesn’t sell, you don’t have to worry about what to do with it. You don’t have to worry about marking it down. You don’t have to worry about where you’re going to put it. You don’t have to worry about stock space. You sell it to them, and then it’s their problem—Nordstrom’s problem.
When you operate a store and sell directly to consumers, you must worry where you’re putting the product, where you’re housing the product, paying your employees, keeping lights on, rotating floor sets, all of those things. But generally, you have a bit higher margin when selling directly to the consumer than you would be selling to wholesale manufacturers.
The onset of the internet may have led people to believe, “Okay, I don’t have to have employees. I don’t have to keep lights on. I don’t have to do any of those things, and I can still sell direct to consumers, so it’s a win-win.”
It’s interesting that over the last decade and a half the shift has led to a direct-to-consumer sales model. That has placed some brands in a great position regarding the margin they can charge because if you’re selling directly to consumers, you’re not selling to a retailer that buys at price. A wholesale price, which is usually a markup price. For example, the product is marked at $50, and you sell it to them at $100, they then sell it to the consumer for $200.
So, if you’re selling directly to the consumer at $200, you’d see a 3X margin from what you were making with your wholesale account. And that’s very attractive. Wholesale accounts had been the norm for almost a hundred years. Older brands have wholesale accounts, and it’s been difficult for them to shift to a direct-to-consumer model because of that.