Fashion retail websites: from product photos to checkout

In online fashion, three things drive revenue in this order: product photography, the size chart, and load speed. Design comes fourth, by a wide margin.

We say this to every fashion client, including the ones who came to buy a beautiful template.

Photography — 70% of the decision

There is no shortcut here. A beautiful website with phone photos shot in a dim room sells less than an ordinary website with proper photography.

The minimum per product:

• One shot on a plain background showing the whole item
• One full-length shot on a real model
• One close detail shot — stitching, fabric, zip
• One from the back

Four images, and the third one is the one that sells. Online buyers worry most about fabric, and only a close-up answers that.

Technically: fashion images have to be heavier than other sectors because fabric detail matters, and they still have to be fast. The right handling is WebP at several sizes, small files in listings and the large one only when a customer opens the detail view.

The size chart — it decides your return rate

Returns are what eats the margin of an online fashion shop, and most returns are about size.

A good size chart has:

• Real measurements in centimetres, not only S/M/L
• The measurements of the garment, not of the body — the single most important difference and one few shops get right
• The model's height and measurements, with the size they are wearing

That third item is the most effective and almost free. "Model is 165cm, 52kg, wearing size M" answers the question a measurement table cannot.

Filters — the way customers think

Fashion customers filter by size, colour, price range, and product type. In that order.

Two common faults: filtering by size without excluding out-of-stock items (a customer picks M, then opens a product with no M left), and not allowing multiple colours at once.

Both cause abandoned baskets, and both are inventory data problems rather than interface problems.

Checkout — Vietnam is different

Do not start with an international payment gateway. In Vietnam the practical order of priority is:

1. Cash on delivery — still the majority of fashion orders outside the big cities
2. Bank transfer with a VietQR code shown — high completion, zero fees
3. E-wallets — MoMo, ZaloPay
4. Cards — necessary if you sell to customers abroad

Starting out, COD plus a QR transfer covers 90% of orders, and neither needs complex integration.

One small detail with a large effect: show shipping cost before the final step. Shipping appearing at checkout is the number one cause of abandonment.

Three things you do not need at the start

Customer accounts. Allow ordering without logging in. Accounts only help once you have repeat buyers.

Product reviews. A product page with an empty review box looks worse than one with none. Add them after you have real orders.

A chatbot. Zalo OA does this better in Vietnam, and your customers are already there.

If you are looking for a ready-made template

Our fashion templates ship with the four-image product layout, a size chart supporting both garment measurements and model details, size filtering that respects stock, and a guest checkout with COD and QR transfer.

If you need stock syncing with a marketplace or your in-store POS, that is custom work — and better done after the site has run for a few months, because by then you know exactly what needs syncing.