10 Great Examples of Online Fashion Stores Mega Menus

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.

What is a mega menu?

Mega menus (sometimes spelled “megamenus”) are a type of expandable menu in which many choices are displayed in a two-dimensional drop-down layout. They are an excellent design choice for accommodating a large number of options or for revealing lower-level site pages at a glance. (1)

Guiding the shopper to the right product page is why mega menus have been invented. Mega menus have become one of the most critical design elements of e-commerce websites. E-commerce web designers are trying to find new ways to simplify the site navigation with innovative approaches to desktop and mobile mega menus design.

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