Fashion and payment orchestration: the perfect marriage

In recent years, thanks to the rise of digital commerce, alternative payment methods and changing customer behaviour, the global fashion Ecommerce market has grown rapidly, forecasted to reach $1.2 trillion in value by 2027, up more than 30% from its projected 2023 value.¹

While Asia is the largest market for fashion Ecommerce, followed by North America, in Europe, around 30% of fashion retail sales are generated through online channels. At the same time, the “old continent” remains a powerhouse as it is home to several of the world’s largest online fashion retailers in terms of market caps (e.g., Zalando, The Hut Group, ASOS, Boohoo, etc.).²

As fashion goes digital, it is becoming simpler for shoppers to purchase products with just a few clicks or taps on a mobile device. This means that, to stay competitive, grow globally, and ensure the best possible user experience, fashion businesses need to improve their digital and omnichannel presence, accept and manage cross-border end-to-end payments and manage the payment lifecycle in a more automatised, centralised, and integrated way. But how can they do that? 

How payment orchestration platforms support fashion firms

Fashion is among the sectors that can benefit the most from the innovative solutions offered by payment orchestration platforms. This is mainly due to the fact that fashion firms (from retailers operating exclusively on the domestic markets to international marketplaces, from fast fashion clothing stores to luxury brands) tend to have very different collecting needs.

Examining the transversal need that fashion companies have to meet the varying expectations of different types of customers, both in terms of purchasing habits and payment preferences, payment orchestrators can help in four main ways:

• Customer experience: For many fashion brands, the overall user experience is becoming integral to the final offer when purchasing online or in a physical store. When it comes to payments, it is thus essential to offer consumers tools that can be perfectly integrated into the purchasing process, making them as frictionless as possible and in line with their expectations. Orchestration platforms allow merchants to activate the alternative payment instruments preferred, increasing clients’ loyalty and reducing the churn rate.
• Cross-border payments: Managing cross-border payments can be complicated and costly. Directly connecting an Ecommerce with multiple PSPs and acquirers, thus relying on the services offered by a payment orchestration platform, allows to choose providers to process transactions, saving on acquiring commissions (cross-border interchange fees) and operating costs while simplifying the underlying bureaucracy.
• Conversion rates: The strategic factor in increasing the conversion rate is dynamic routing, an intelligent and automatic engine which helps cutting costs and reducing failed payments. Moreover, integrating solutions capable of effectively managing SCA (Strong Customer Authentication), taking advantage of the exemption opportunities offered by PSD2, increases the number of payments that pass the authentication phase safely, bringing a tangible benefit to the shopping cart conversion rate.
• Omnichannel experience: As the fashion world keeps evolving, retailers are adopting solutions that can replicate the same degree of satisfaction regardless of the number of digital or traditional channels chosen for the purchase. The distinction between online and offline customers is becoming less and less relevant as consumers have hybrid profiles: they order online but want to pick products in-store (Click-and-Collect), buy via Ecommerce and return in-store, inquire information online but buy at the point of sale (info-commerce), or try on the garments in-store and then buy them online (showrooming). Omnichannel payment orchestration players can improve fashion companies’ processes, allowing merchants to track each interaction they have with customers regardless of the sales channel.

Fabrick at the service of fashion: The Giglio.com case study

Giglio, a family-owned fashion firm founded in Sicily in the 1960s and today a well-known international player in the field of luxury clothing and accessories, decided to move towards the digital world in the 1990s when its founder and CEO, Giuseppe Giglio, sensed that the best way to grow the company and innovate was to seize the opportunities encouraged by the internet. To achieve this long-term goal, Giglio became a Sella Group client while it switched to a proprietary platform in 2013.

In more recent years, Giglio has identified Fabrick as a partner to support the management of payments, which are increasingly global. By using Fabrick’s Payment Orchestra™ solution, today Giglio can accept payments in over 50 currencies and integrate 13 different payment methods to meet the needs of a varied clientele, both regarding the countries they live in, their habits and approach to digital channels.

On top of this, Giglio has also been the first business to adopt Fabrick’s Guaranteed Payments, our fraud prevention service – part of our payment orchestration solutions – based on machine learning. Thanks to this tool, manual activities to safeguard revenue have been significantly reduced, and the ability to identify false positives has led to an increase in the authorisation rate, resulting in immediate benefits to the income statement.

Giglio has set very challenging goals for themselves for the next few years and Fabrick is proud to support this innovative company achieving continuous growth while never forgetting their golden rule: "the customer is always right".

Do you wish to learn more? Have a look at Fabrick solutions for the Fashion Industry.