
When we are helping our clients, we regularly research online shoppers behavior trends, and we look for best solutions to solve common issues that many online retailers are facing.
One of the problems that we hear from many merchants is decreasing customer engagement rates, and ‘’add to cart rate”.
Finding a match between the product and a potential customer is what drives the store’s success. If customers don’t find what they are looking for, they leave the store without making a purchase. E-commerce is no different. Helping users to find products in online shops is even more important since there is no store associate nearby to ask where the item is located. Because of that the site navigation menus that help to find the desired product is one of the most important aspects of an e-commerce store.
In this blog, we review ten examples of the menu design for online fashion stores. We selected the apparel retail stores because organizing items in online fashion stores is not an easy task since they usually sell many brands, types of products and target multiple customer segments such as women/men/children.
E-commerce trends that push innovation in the site navigation design
Here are few trends in e-commerce that continue driving innovation in online stores design including the website’s navigation:
- We continue to see fast double digits growth of e-commerce sales both Globally and in North America year over year.
- Apparel and fashion where one of the fastest growing retail categories and become number one by online sales volume at the end of 2015 (2)
- The share of traffic and orders from mobile devices is growing and mobile traffic reaches 57% last year. (3)

- The “add to cart” rate is decreasing (see the chart below) (4), which means more shoppers leave the site before even adding anything to their shopping cart. The rate is even smaller on mobile devices.

How the leading online apparel retailer that sell products with multiple categories, styles, brands, models, and sizes are trying to help shoppers to navigate within their online stores and not be lost or overwhelmed with too many choices or very long results of simple site searches?
We looked at many sites that sell fashion products and selected few examples that we believe provide a good solution for site navigation complexity problem. In this blog, we picked five examples of desktop mega menus and five mobiles menu designs.
Top 5 Mega Menus Desktop
Protest
https://www.protest.eu/

Why it works
- Clearly visible main categories: men, women, and kids
- Color Contrasts for secondary categories menu for greater visibility
New look
http://www.newlook.com/

Why it works
- Clear Top Categories
- Mega menu has further drill downs
- Images with direct links to specific sections
LUISAVIAROMA
https://www.luisaviaroma.com/

Why it works
- Main categories divided further on the mega menu drop down
- Ability to view products by multiple attributes such age, product type
asos
http://www.asos.com/

Why it works
- Ability to really narrow down what product you are looking
- Sales directly displayed in menu
boohoo
http://www.boohoo.com/

Why it works
- This menu is the mega menu of all menus. It has offers, categories, etc. anything found on the site directly in the menu
Top 5 Mobile Menus
Uniqlo
http://www.uniqlo.com/

Why it works
- Clearly visible main categories that move to the top once selected
- Lots of colors for easy visibility
Frank and Oak
https://www.frankandoak.com/

Why it works
- Main categories are positioned side by side instead of top to bottom
- Allows different ways of navigating through the store, including sales and clearance items directly in the menu
Protest
https://www.protest.eu/

Why it works
- Big and visible main categories
- Clearly visible search
Farfetch
https://www.farfetch.com

Why it works
- High contrast with the background
- Eye catching color highlights for sale items
asos
http://www.asos.com/

Why it works
- Clearly visible main categories
- Prominent focus on secondary categories in red
Conclusion – Top 5 trends in Fashion Menus
These are the emerging trends that we have observed after looking the top eCommerce sites around the globe.
- Few but deep product categories that keep the shopper on a particularly designed path
- Using color contrast to draw shopper attention to desired information
- Using images to increase awareness of important areas
- Including key information such as sales in the menu
- Allowing multiple ways to look for products, such as size, type, etc.
This article is a continuation of our eCommerce websites best practice article series
References
- Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation, https://www.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well/
- 9 FASHION AND APPAREL ECOMMERCE TRENDS IN 2017, http://www.visualnext.com/business/9-fashion-industry-ecommerce-trends-in-2017/
- Shopping Index, https://www.demandware.com/shopping-index/
- 20 Reasons Your eCommerce Conversion Rate Is So Low, http://optinmonster.com/reasons-your-ecommerce-site-has-a-low-conversion-rate/