Digital showrooms: A guide for fashion brands to improve their wholesale
Technological innovation, the pursuit of sustainability, and the recent pandemic have encouraged many brands to move their wholesale business into digital showrooms. These bring the physical and digital worlds together, removing the obstacles of operating across different channels.
Why are digital showrooms such a hot trend among fashion brands that sell wholesale? How do they make wholesale frictionless, foster retail partnerships, and cut costs for brands and B2B buyers? If you’re curious about the answers to these questions, let’s dive into our blog post.
What is a digital showroom in the wholesale business?
A digital showroom is an online platform that allows fashion brands to showcase their products in a virtual environment to retailers and wholesalers without the need for costly physical showrooms and trade shows. Digital showrooms give B2B buyers a great way to connect with your brand, view and interact with products, place orders, and manage their accounts.
For fashion brands that embrace an always-on virtual mindset, digital showrooms are the way forward. Traditional showrooms used Excel sheets, pencil and paper to organize merchandise, so moving into the digital realm is a welcome upgrade. Modern showrooms cater to B2B buyers seeking an alternative to offline meetings with salespeople to place wholesale orders. Buyers can browse the latest fashion collections from anywhere and on any device, and order on their own. Virtual showrooms cut costs on travel, renting and preparing the physical space, organizing in-person meetings, and allowing for efficient collaboration.
Brands invest in online showrooms to support their sustainability efforts. By moving all wholesale processes online, brands reduce their waste and carbon footprint, addressing the needs of modern environmentally conscious buyers.
With 90% of buyers expecting the same level of service from B2B websites as from B2C ones, fashion brands seek technology that will help them to meet those expectations. And digital showrooms are the perfect fit, letting brands invite merchants to a digital space with individual pricing, global tax calculations, shipping management, advanced filtering, sorting and search options, and more.
For more details read in: How successful fashion brands navigate the move from DTC to wholesale.
What are the advantages of using digital showrooms for fashion brands in wholesale?
Fashion brands with digital showrooms can benefit from the following:
Streamlined preorders and reorders
With a digital showroom, fashion brands can present their new collections without costly travel and waiting for physical samples. Moreover, brands can offer B2B buyers an extensive product catalog with detailed descriptions, images, and videos of each item. This simplifies the ordering process, as B2B buyers can view, select, and preorder products online anytime and anywhere. Buyers can see products from every angle in the digital catalog, improving their confidence and increasing their chances of ordering.
Digital showrooms help buyers access past orders and make repeat purchases more efficiently, simplifying the reorder process and ensuring that the brand retains loyal customers.
Capturing sales around the clock
Unlike traditional showrooms, digital ones are available 24/7, thereby improving the brand’s accessibility – you can capture sales at any time, without being limited by showroom opening hours and B2B buyers’ different time zones and locations. This also benefits B2B buyers who can view and purchase products whenever convenient for them. It is particularly useful for brands that operate in different time zones or have buyers based in different parts of the world, who may not have easy access to physical showrooms due to geographical constraints.
Also, online showrooms eliminate the need for appointment-based viewing, allowing buyers to visit whenever it is convenient for them. Furthermore, buyers have the freedom to review and compare products at their own pace, without feeling rushed by a showroom representative or restricted by the availability of physical samples.
All that makes it a win-win scenario as brands can increase their visibility and reach, capture sales around the clock, and provide a better buying experience for their buyers.
Faster time to market
Fashion brands can market their products more quickly with online showrooms. No more waiting for physical samples and finishing whole collections to sell your products. Instead, you can create digital samples and instantly send them to B2B buyers for review and feedback. This reduces lead times and speeds up the decision-making process on which products to produce, shortening the time it takes to get your goods to market. In addition, digital showrooms allow brands to display their entire product range in one place, simplifying the review and purchase process for B2B buyers.
Connecting wholesale to direct-to-consumer sales
Depending on the showroom providers, you can also connect your wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales channels. This will optimize your sales and marketing efforts and reduce overhead costs. By showcasing products online, fashion brands can provide a seamless shopping experience for customers whether they are buying from a retailer or directly from your brand.
A centralized database of integrated wholesale and direct-to-consumer sales offers your brand inventory management, reduces the risk of overstocking or understocking, and increases your business profitability.
Growing retail partnerships
Through state-of-the-art digital showrooms, fashion brands can exhibit and promote their collections in an immersive and cost-effective environment, leveraging detailed product information, images, and videos to reach a wider audience and boost their visibility in the marketplace.
Brands gain an effective tool to manage inventory and ensure products are delivered on time, which builds trust with retail partners. With an easy-to-use online platform for B2B buyers, wholesale commerce managers can enhance the purchasing experience by reducing order completion times and showing real-time product availability, which further strengthens relationships with retailers.
Cost-effectiveness
Instead of spending tons of money on physical showrooms, expensive travel, and countless samples, brands can create visually stunning digital showrooms at low cost. Virtual showrooms help you reduce the expense associated with sample production and shipping, as buyers can view digital samples online. And if a new collection displayed online fails to generate enough preorders, brands can cancel production and save money.
The virtual nature of these showrooms allows you to reach B2B buyers and retailers across the globe with minimal expense. Additionally, a digital showroom's easy scalability enables you to expand your brand's reach without investing in large physical spaces as your business grows.
Enhanced buyer experience
With a visually appealing and user-friendly interface, B2B buyers can browse and view products in detail. The incorporation of videos, animations, 360-degree views, and other interactive features into presentations translates into more engaging and comprehensive sales. All these features empower fashion brands to better communicate the value and uniqueness of their wares.
Digital showrooms allow B2B buyers to access your brand's product catalog anytime without traveling or attending trade shows. This on-demand access lets buyers explore your offerings at their own pace, improving the overall experience.
Convenience
Digital showrooms offer the convenience of online shopping, allowing retailers to easily browse a brand's product offerings and place orders from anywhere. It grants retailers greater access to the full product catalog, to browse a wider selection of products in greater detail. The effect is that retailers can make informed buying decisions and tailor their offerings to their customers.
Improved product assortments
Fashion brands can optimize product assortments by analyzing how their products perform with retailers via online showrooms. It’s simpler to create a comprehensive assortment with a digital library of products where you select, modify, and search items. A well-designed product catalog allows retailers to discover products that are likely to speak to buyers. Online showrooms make it possible to plan an assortment from anywhere, on any device.
A more efficient collaboration
With a comprehensive virtual environment, you can manage multiple orders and work with numerous buyers simultaneously, ensuring a smooth buying experience. B2B buyers and retailers can access vital information - including product descriptions, pricing, and inventory levels - within seconds, significantly reducing the need for time-consuming back-and-forth communication.
In such a dynamically changing industry as fashion, making quick but informed decisions is key.
By enabling faster response times, brands and retail partners can discuss product details, negotiate deals, and provide feedback without delay.
Finally, digital showrooms offer analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling your brand to track buyer activity, identify best-selling items, and monitor trends. This invaluable data can be shared with retail partners, allowing both parties to tailor their offerings to meet consumer demands.
In-depth insights
Digital showrooms supply brands with a wealth of information on their B2B buyers and their preferences. By tracking buyer interactions and activity in the digital showroom, brands can gain insights into what products are in demand and what features are most effective. This data helps them to adapt and refine their product offerings to satisfy market trends and customer expectations.
You can use collected data to identify potential gaps in the market, enabling you to develop new partnerships and collaborations that can propel your brand forward. Also, understanding trends and preferences in the B2B space enables you to optimize your inventory management and adjust pricing strategies, helping you stay ahead of the competition and improve your presence in the wholesale market.
High-season efficiency
Copying orders can be a time-saver during peak seasons or when dealing with multiple accounts, markets, and price lists. Instead of manually entering orders several times over, brands can easily copy and transfer them to the appropriate accounts, saving valuable time for both brands and buyers.
Reduced admin work
Digital showrooms eliminate the need for in-person meetings and trade shows, resulting in fewer administrative tasks associated with physical space and travel. What’s more, digital back ends help brands automate fulfillment and back-office processes, cutting further admin tasks and minimizing errors that can disrupt business operations. Reducing admin tasks lets sales representatives focus on creating and fostering long-term relationships with key accounts.
How do digital showrooms help fashion brands be more sustainable?
For many modern fashion brands, sustainability is part of their DNA. They care about the longevity of their products, commit to using organic and recycled materials, support fair labor practices, and aim to protect the environment and society.
Digital showrooms can contribute to sustainability in the following ways:
Smaller carbon footprint: B2B buyers can browse collections from their office without having to travel, thereby reducing carbon emissions from transportation. Online showrooms also remove the need for physical stores, which lowers energy consumption and emissions from transportation as well.
Reduced waste: Displaying and viewing products in a virtual environment eliminates the need for physical samples or prototypes. This reduces the waste generated by the production process and prevents unsold inventory from building up. Online showrooms do away with physical linesheets and lookbooks, which are typically printed on paper. By using digital versions, brands cut paper usage, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and saving trees.
Increased transparency: Online showrooms can lead to greater transparency in the fashion supply chain. Brands can encourage sustainable practices throughout the supply chain by sharing detailed information about the materials used, the production process, and the environmental impact of products.
What are the key features of digital showroom software?
The digital showroom offers a range of features that empower fashion brands to enhance the wholesale buying experience. Depending on the digital showroom service providers, these platforms can equip brands with different functionalities. The most important ones include:
Product displays
Typically a digital showroom has high-quality product displays that exhibit each item in detail. This gives B2B buyers a sense of the product's design, quality, and characteristics, making the purchase more straightforward. Brands can use multiple images to present their fashion items from different angles, including close-ups to highlight certain details such as logos, fabric texture, patterns, etc.
Example of product displays in Centra's showroom
Shoppable hotspots
Shoppable hotspots are interactive tags brands can drop to product images that allow B2B buyers to easily add items to their orders. These elements let shoppers access detailed product information and view close-ups with just a click or tap. This feature offers a convenient experience that can delight buyers but also drives revenue.
Shoppable hotspots used in Centra’s Showroom
Lookbooks
Lookbooks are the backbone of showrooms. They exhibit a brand’s products in a specific theme or style. Creating on-brand lookbooks lets retailers visualize how the products can be styled and displayed in their stores. Publishing compelling lookbooks with brand-authentic, editorial-looking photos give fashion brands a tool to attract retail partners, increase sales, and promote new collections.
Management of complex variants and sizes
Handling a fashion brand’s complex product catalogs with multiple sizes, colors, and SKUs is not an easy feat. It’s crucial to have an online showroom that deals with product variants and sizes, so brands can make their goods easy to manage and sell to customers. That saves time and reduces mistakes associated with manual data entry.
What’s more, some wholesale digital showrooms like Centra’s provide brands with tools to streamline the process by managing complex variants and bulk uploads. Brands can easily manage and organize their catalogs, even with an extensive product portfolio.
Custom attributes
In addition, digital showrooms provide the flexibility to apply predefined product attributes or create custom ones to meet the needs of your brand. This functionality is similar to that of a fully-featured PIM (product information management) system, allowing you to manage product data more efficiently and accurately.
Custom pages
When building a showroom, brands can take advantage of custom pages aligned with their visual identity to demonstrate their fashion collections to B2B buyers. Product pages can be enhanced with on-brand images, videos, and text; they can also include shoppable products and localized size charts. With custom pages, brands can display their product assortments beautifully and consistently, optimizing the buyer experience.
Visibility settings
Brands can tailor their product assortments and messages to target markets through digital showrooms by restricting the visibility of certain page sections to buyers in different regions. This allows them to provide a more relevant experience to their B2B buyers, which can result in increased customer loyalty and repeat business.
Custom labels
Applying custom labels is a simple and effective way to promote new products, special deals, or fashion lines in your digital showroom. Adding eye-catching labels to products draws attention to those items and displays them prominently in product listings.
For example, B2B marketers can add these labels to highlight limited-time offers or low-stock items to encourage buyers to order quickly before products sell out. In this way, you can manage inventory efficiently and reduce excess stock.
Fashion sales campaigns and discounts
Brands operating wholesale need tools for running sales campaigns and discounts. Setting campaigns and exclusive deals based on specific criteria lets brands tailor their pricing strategies and leverage discounting capabilities to meet the desires of individual wholesale accounts. As a result, brands can gain more loyal customers and increase order volume.
Linesheet templates
Linesheets are the cornerstones of showrooms – they simplify the process of placing orders and managing accounts for B2B buyers. With linesheets, you can present buyers with a list of selected products and custom pricing. It’s possible to add product attributes and information, sorting and filtering products to clarify your offer for buyers.
For an in-depth information, head over to the blog post on creating linesheets for fashion.
Intuitive interface
A digital showroom with a user-friendly and visually pleasing interface is more likely to appeal to B2B buyers and facilitate purchases. With an intuitive interface, brands can simplify the buying process by allowing buyers to quickly find the products they want, learn more about them, and order them without any trouble. This creates a good impression of your brand and your service, which in turn helps strengthen your relationship with retailers and B2B partners.
A well-designed, engaging interface encourages buyers to explore the showroom and discover more products, leading to more sales.
Integrated analytics
Having an analytics integration shows you the fuller picture of how B2B buyers navigate the showroom and interact with your products. Analytics software delivers real-time data that’s ready to import to your favorite BI tool for in-depth analysis.
By tracking metrics such as page views and order details, you can get a closer look at which products are resonating with buyers and where they get stuck and reach out to you for help. With that data at your fingertips, you'll be able to make sound decisions about improving your offering, marketing, and customer service.
On the other hand, if you notice that certain products consistently underperform, you may want to reposition them. Depending on the analytics integration you choose, you might be able to identify areas where customers experience friction in the buying process.
With data collected from your showroom, you can decide which products to promote, which marketing campaigns to invest in, and what to tweak in that environment.
The Centra back end dashboard
What are the advantages of a digital showroom in optimizing inventory management?
Fashion brands seeking to optimize their inventory management can take advantage of a digital showroom to manage their supplies efficiently.
No more overstocking and stockouts
Through a digital showroom, brands can stay on top of their inventory levels and manage them efficiently as they get real-time updates. It means you can quickly see which products are selling and which are not, then decide how much to restock, creating a more cost-efficient supply chain. You can also run end-of-season promotions with promo codes, vouchers, and discounts to quickly clear excess inventory.
On top of that, you can manage your inventory levels by syncing your sales and purchases into our B2B accounting software, ensuring the timely delivery of orders.
Fewer errors
When B2B buyers place orders electronically, errors are less likely to happen and orders are filled correctly. You'll avoid returning or refunding expensive orders, saving time and money.
Efficient order processing
With automation, a centralized platform, an interactive catalog, and options to copy orders, showrooms enhance the efficiency of order and fulfillment processing, reducing the time it takes to get products to buyers. Delivering products quickly and efficiently keeps brands competitive.
Better communication with B2B buyers
Digital showrooms give brands a platform to communicate with buyers and get feedback on their products. Brands can use this information to stay on top of trends, adjust their product offerings, and manage inventory efficiently.
What are the challenges of implementing digital showrooms?
Building digital showrooms has numerous benefits, but it also comes with several challenges that can limit your brand's growth.
Integrating the digital showroom with existing technology
One of the biggest challenges is integrating the digital showroom with your existing tech stack, especially if it is outdated, which might be the case with monolithic or legacy ecommerce platforms.
Another issue is the complexity involved with combining various systems, which often requires expert knowledge. And if you don’t have such experts in-house, you might have to hire an external agency to help you.
Having a seamless data flow across the wholesale platform, payment and order processing systems, inventory management platform, and customer relationship management tools is crucial to let you run your business uninterrupted. This can be costly and time-consuming to set up, especially if your brand is not already well-established in the ecommerce space.
To overcome this, it may be necessary to invest in modern technology and work with a digital showroom provider that supports a robust and flexible infrastructure, such as a headless ecommerce platform. Such platforms offer plug-and-play setups that will grow with you and let you scale different parts of the back end independently.
For more details on headless technology, read: Why do fashion brands replatform to headless back ends?
Making the digital showroom user-friendly
B2B buyers, just like those in the D2C, want easy-to-navigate sites and intuitive interfaces when they shop. First, this requires extensive user testing and feedback gathering to ensure the showroom meets buyers’ expectations.
Second, it involves collaboration between UX/UI designers, developers, and fashion experts, and it may take several iterations to perfect the user journey. Striking the right balance between aesthetics, functionality, and ease of use is no easy feat, but worth the effort.
Ensuring security
Security is also a concern when implementing a digital showroom, as it involves the transfer of buyer data such as payment details and product specifications, and the necessity of safeguarding the platform against cyber threats.
Additionally, showrooms house a brand's creative work, designs, and upcoming collections, which are considered intellectual property that must be secured from theft or unauthorized distribution.
It’s also crucial to keep the showroom secure and compliant with relevant data protection regulations.
Accurate product presentation
Selling fashion online poses the challenge of presenting products accurately. As buyers can’t experience the look and feel of products, providing clear, high-quality images and videos that represent your products' qualities and details accurately is essential. Some showrooms use 3D modeling to create an immersive and engaging experience.
To accomplish this, you should invest in photography and video production, then organize and upload these assets to your platform.
Digital showroom examples from top fashion brands
Let’s now look at two examples of fashion brands that upgraded their wholesale with digital showrooms: Eton and Nudie Jeans.
Eton transforms its business with a digital showroom
Eton, a shirt brand renowned for its commitment to innovation, has joined forces with Centra to revolutionize its wholesale operations. While Eton continues to value the significance of traditional face-to-face meetings, the brand has now expanded its capabilities to include a very efficient remote wholesale operation as well.
Improved buyer experience
With an online showroom, Eton improves and automates the order cancellation process. By reducing in-person meetings, sales reps can cancel and place new orders from the convenience of their office. When an order is canceled, the brand can suggest alternative products to the buyers - conveniently, and without ever leaving the digital showroom.
Moreover, Eton enhances the B2B buyer experience by assisting buyers in choosing the right size shirts, overshirts, and other garments by offering a size guide on the showroom website. This helps to avoid a return process that is problematic both for the brand and its customers.
The showroom helps buyers navigate the product portfolio and find all relevant information, from washing instructions, through about pages, all the way to customer support.
New products in the spotlight
The showroom’s custom pages can play different roles. For example, Eton’s team builds separate pages to make new products or lines stand out. The brand adds impressive images stretching the full width of the page to better visualize its products with close-ups highlighting the details.
Brand-authentic lookbooks and pages
The brand leverages the showroom’s custom CMS pages which were improved with significant input and field experience of Eton's team. They’re used to create, for example, attractive lookbooks with true-to-brand, crisp photos presenting shirts and accessories, and shoppable hotspots. The brand can easily share the lookbooks with B2B buyers and retail partners to streamline the sales process.
Eton pays attention to the smallest details while crafting its products – color palettes, fabric finishes, prints, textures, and seams. The brand’s digital showroom displays high-quality, rich visuals such as videos and images, improving the overall ordering experience for the buyers. The brand also has design flexibility to invite customers to see the behind-the-scenes of the design process or show what inspires it to create materials, patterns, and fabric or desired textures. This makes the showroom more attractive and brings the brand closer to its audience.
Minimized admin workload
The digital transformation of the wholesale processes reduced Eton's administrative burden – sales representatives no longer had to deal with tedious paperwork or manually enter data into an ERP system. They can instead laser in on selling and customer service.
Additionally, the digital showroom also reduces follow-up time, since buyers can edit and make changes to their orders at any time.
Optimized preorder and reorder flows
Eton’s team worked closely with Centra and provided the platform team with comprehensive input on how to optimize their preorder and reorder customer journey. For instance, a B2B buyer can browse a product catalog with strict divisions between stock, reorder, and preorder items. Thanks to that Eton can display the status of products and the delivery date clearly for buyers.
Additionally, Eton’s showroom simplifies preorder and reorder processes for B2B partners, who can view upcoming collections and manage orders simultaneously, wherever they are. The showroom offers tools to assist wholesale partners in making better selections, reviewing purchases, and visualizing how the fashion items will be displayed in stores.
You can find more details about Eton’s showroom in our case study.
How Nudie Jeans reinvented its wholesale experience with a digital showroom
Nudie Jeans has implemented Centra’s digital showroom to drive its wholesale business to new heights by gaining the ability to run operations remotely. Intuitive and rich in features, the platform lets the brand and its B2B buyers swiftly handle orders while reducing errors to virtually zero. By digitizing its wholesale, the brand reduces the expenses associated with managing a large sales force and can concentrate on producing long-lasting and eco-friendly clothing for its global audience.
Full on-brand experience
The private showroom built by Centra enables Nudie Jeans to tailor their wholesale experience to represent its brand. They can apply content marketing and storytelling to appeal to buyers’ emotions while maintaining control over the narrative and offering an efficient and on-brand experience that buyers want to return to. The brand retains ownership of valuable buyer insights and data when collaborating with agents and distributors.
Optimizing inventory
With digitized wholesale operations, Nudie Jeans can efficiently manage its inventory and simplify the reordering process. First, a digital showroom makes it easier for the brand to track orders and guarantee the right products are available for sale at the right time. And they can also use the showroom’s custom pages to create dedicated pages for different campaigns, such as for replenishment, to make their stock available for reorders in a simple and inspiring way.
Making direct-to-retail marketing work for a wholesale
A lot of brands do wholesale the old-fashioned way, with sales reps carrying samples around the world and taking orders by phone, email, or fax. Brands with a progressive orientation like Nudie Jeans can now efficiently sell to wholesale accounts worldwide with modern digital marketing methods.
Nudie Jeans displays its collections on digital wholesale marketplaces to gain traction and interest. They are revamping their tactics through creative and data-driven digital marketing. They use email and other channels to engage buyers in targeted and personalized campaigns that boost wholesale sales. With this approach, the brand owns its relationship with wholesale buyers directly, without middlemen like agents, distributors, or B2B marketplaces.
Relationship-building with key accounts
In this new wholesale ecommerce approach, sales reps spend less time on administrative tasks and traveling, focusing instead on building strong relationships with customers' important accounts. This increases up-sell conversions and maintains loyalty with buyers.
For a deeper dive into how Nudie Jeans has leveraged the latest technology to optimize its wholesale operations, see their case study.
How to launch a digital showroom: 8 major steps
Here are eight key steps to launching a successful digital showroom:
Step 1: Identify your audience and goals
It's important to know what your fashion brand wants to accomplish with a digital showroom and who your target audience is before you launch one. Define your target audience by understanding your brand's niche, analyzing current clients, studying industry trends, and working with your sales and marketing teams. Then you can create a showroom that resonates with your B2B customers and caters to their needs. Your goals could include optimizing the buying process, growing sales, engaging with B2B buyers, cutting down sales cycles, raising order values, and reducing unsold stock.
Step 2: Select a platform vendor for your showroom
Choosing the right platform sets the stage for launching a successful digital showroom. It is important to get a platform that matches your business requirements and features that let you run your showroom operations smoothly. Customization options, a user-friendly interface, ecommerce capabilities, and analytics and reporting tools are all vital.
While evaluating a platform, you should also consider costs, ease of use, possible integrations, as well as your business requirements. For the list of major features to look for, check section 4. What are the key features of digital showroom software?
Step 3: Choose an inspiring design
A digital showroom's design is instrumental in creating an engaging and visually pleasing experience for your B2B customers. Make sure to create a digital showroom that aligns with your brand's aesthetic – use your branding elements, stunning images, and on-brand lookbooks. Take advantage of displays to feature your products differently in different markets. Build dedicated pages for special campaigns and events, and produce a genuine and distinguished “about” page.
Step 4: Add your products
Once you have your platform and design in place, it's time to add your products to your digital showroom. Make sure to include detailed descriptions, top-quality images, and pricing information for each product. Organize your products into categories that make sense for your customers, such as by type, size, campaign, or collection.
Step 5. Set up payment and shipping options
Another step is to integrate secure and reliable payment gateways to offer a variety of payment methods like credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets. Check that your payment system in the checkout complies with security standards like SSL encryption to protect client data during transactions.
Digital showrooms should also include shipping options. Provide B2B buyers with different shipping options, including standard, express, and international delivery. Make sure to display shipping rates and any potential import duties or taxes to avoid surprising buyers. A good solution is partnering with reputable shipping carriers to ensure timely and reliable delivery, and offering free shipping promotions or a flat rate to encourage sales. Smooth and transparent shipping will foster customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Step 6. Monitor performance
By monitoring the performance of your digital showroom you’ll be able to spot areas for potential enhancement, understand B2B buyer behavior, and take action based on data. Using built-in or third-party analytics you can track average order value, number of orders, preorders, order values, and more to measure the effectiveness of your showroom in terms of sales.
Step 7. Test your digital showroom before the launch
Before your digital showroom goes live, every aspect of the website should be tested to create a seamless user experience. That covers checking all the pages, links, and navigation elements and the entire purchase process for functionality and responsiveness. The showroom should be mobile-friendly and display correctly on various devices and browsers.
Step 8. Continually iterate and refine
Once your showroom is up and running it will require continuous updates with new products, features, and promotions to keep B2B buyers engaged. Staying up to date with industry trends, technological advancements, and buyer preferences is essential here. To create an excellent B2B buying experience, it’s good to incorporate buyer feedback on the performance of your showroom, missing products, or features. You can enhance your digital showroom by regularly reviewing and refining its user interface, navigation, and overall functionality.
What are the best practices for using digital showrooms?
Here are some good practices to follow when seeking to up your virtual selling game:
Create a visually appealing and user-friendly showroom: A showroom should be attractive and easy to navigate, with a clean layout and crisp, on-brand images. A must-have is clear categories and filters that let B2B buyers quickly find the products they are looking for. With shoppable hotspots and lookbooks, you can help buyers visualize how to style your fashion items. Finally, adding detailed information and localized size charts will make selecting items more convenient.
Deliver personalized recommendations: With your analytics and historical data on buyers and orders, you can provide personalized product recommendations for cross- and up-sells. In this way, you increase your chances of making a sale and establishing a long-term relationship with retail buyers.
Offer personal consultations: One-on-one consultations can make buyers feel more connected to your brand and products. Through personal consultation, you can make product recommendations tailored to the buyer’s needs. These consultations can be conducted with virtual appointments through video conferencing tools or chatbots.
Provide detailed product information: Including detailed product information such as localized size charts, fit, material composition, and care instructions is essential to let B2B buyers make informed choices about their purchases. A successful purchase protects brands from costly returns or dissatisfied customers.
Maintain a high level of customer service: Great customer service plays a vital role in maintaining buyer satisfaction. First, your customer success team should be easy to reach and responsive. It’s also good to give B2B different channels to contact you if any questions arise. Make sure your products have precise product information, accurate images and descriptions, and regularly update your product catalog. Also, keep buyers up to date with the order status, shipping, and delivery details. To improve your service, you can provide flexible and easy-to-use return and exchange policies that build trust and loyalty.
Optimize for all devices. In the era of always-on-the-go buyers, it’s crucial to design and develop a user interface that works seamlessly on the full range of devices, from desktops to laptops, tablets, and mobiles. Creating a responsive website allows users to access and navigate the showroom freely regardless of screen size, resolution, or orientation.
Frequently asked questions:
Why are digital showrooms better than traditional showrooms for fashion brands?
In a nutshell, physical showrooms demand significant investments, limit fashion brands’ reach, and require B2B buyers to travel to view and order products. Moreover, in traditional showrooms, the entire sales process takes longer as it requires traveling, waiting for physical samples, and finishing the entire collection. In contrast, digital showrooms shorten the sales cycle, reduce overhead costs, increase access to global buyers, and give brands the freedom to showcase products and add or change product information. Modern online showrooms make the ordering process simpler and cost-effective for brands and buyers alike.
What are digital showroom software vendors?
Digital showroom software vendors are companies that provide brands with commerce platforms that let them exhibit fashion products, connect with B2B buyers, manage online product catalogs, and enable ordering and payment transactions.
Choosing the right vendor gets you a platform that will do the heavy lifting for your brand so you can focus on strategies and tactics to achieve your business objectives and stand out in the competitive fashion industry.
Digital showroom software providers on the market include:
Joor
NuORDER
Centra
Ordre
Le New Black
Stitch
If you'd like to learn more about some of them, visit our comparison page here.
How can digital showrooms enhance the wholesale buying experience for B2B buyers?
The convenience and ease of purchase facilitated by digital showrooms can enhance the wholesale buying experience for B2B buyers. It makes it easy for them to place orders and reorder products, increasing sales and revenue of your fashion brand.
What do B2B buyers want from digital showrooms?
B2B buyers want digital showrooms that give them a seamless and engaging buying experience. That means your showroom should have excellent product images, clear product information, and intuitive navigation. Buyers also expect showrooms to show real-time inventory updates so they can plan their purchases accordingly. To stay competitive, they need data on product performance, customer preferences, and market trends in order to make informed decisions. B2B buyers want to use the data to refine personalization and product recommendations so they can better cater to the preferences of their consumer base.
