Fashion Passes the One Check It Never Had to Work For

Last Tuesday I made a pot of coffee and ran my standard audit across every fashion business I had an address for.

3,320 shops across 24 markets, and 2,064 of them had a website for me to open.

Same checks as always, in the same order as always, because changing the order is how I start missing things. It ate most of the day and four cups of coffee.

Stars first, then the address bar, then the phone, then the sentences a person actually reads. I keep to that order because a good result early on makes me far too generous about everything that follows it.

Three of the stops made me sit back in the chair. I’ll take them the way they came, and your own store went through every one of them without hearing from me.

Where do you think yours falls down?

First: the listing, before I open a website at all

I never start on the site, because your customer doesn’t start there either. She starts on a map with gold stars on it and a row of competitors underneath you.

Fashion looked ordinary at that stop and I have nothing entertaining to report. Most of these shops have stars under their names, and I moved on quicker than I usually do.

Second: the address bar

The lock is one of the ten checks I run, and last Tuesday the clothing shops came out top of all 47 trades I follow.

98.1% of the fashion sites I audited serve their pages over a locked connection, against 94% of everything I audit.

My check there is a crude thing. It asks for the page, looks at how the page came back, and writes down a yes or a no.

I ran the whole check twice, because a result that clean usually means my robot has broken. It hadn’t.

The lock earns its keep at one moment, and only one. She’s on the bus with your coat sitting in the basket and her thumb hovering over the pay button, and her phone picks that second to tell her your shop isn’t safe.

Nobody types a card number after that. She doesn’t email you about it either, so the sale simply never appears and you carry on with your evening.

That moment barely happens in this trade. Fair play, except for what comes next.

Third: the address again, without the lock

A store can hold a certificate and still answer the door at its own unlocked address.

Closing that second door is a separate instruction, one line of it, living wherever your site is hosted. Nothing on your own screen ever complains when it’s missing, and your phone will never show it to you, because your phone has been to your shop a thousand times.

Plumbers get caught by that gap harder than anyone I audit, and for the same reason: the address nobody in the business ever types is the one that’s broken.

92.8% of these shops do move those visitors across, where 88% of the sites in my whole audit manage it.

The other ones lose a specific woman. She’s holding a coat she bought from you in 2021, reading your address off the swing tag because she wants the same thing in a size up, and what arrives on her screen is a warning about security instead of your knitwear.

Every trade has her. At one pool company she was every regular who typed his name in off the side of the van, because the people who like you most are the ones still typing an address by hand.

When did anyone last try yours from a phone that had never visited your shop before?

So who deserves the credit here?

Not you, and I say that with affection.

54.8% of the stores I audited run on Shopify, which is more of a single platform than I see in most trades, and a hosted store hands out the certificate on the first day without asking anyone to approve it.

That result has the same cause as seatbelts in a new car. Someone decided years ago that the owner shouldn’t be trusted with the choice, and they turned out to be right about it.

When did anyone at your shop last give the certificate a thought? If the honest answer is never, then never is the right answer, and it’s the only check on my whole list where I’d accept it.

The certificate is one small piece of keeping a website safe, and it happens to be the piece that turned up without anyone at your shop deciding anything.

Does that make the win worthless? Not even slightly. The customer standing in the warning screen has no interest in whose decision it was, and a trade that quietly avoids that screen is a trade with one less way to lose an evening’s sales.

It does mean the good news stops the second my checks stop being automatic. Which they do, immediately.

Fourth: the phone

Next I load the store on a simulated phone over a connection deliberately slower than the wifi in your office, because your customer is standing at a bus stop and not sitting at a desk.

Fashion averages 52 out of 100 for mobile speed, where everything I audit averages 58. Google’s own scale files anything under 90 as work still to do.

That stop is the one that annoyed me, because in your trade the photographs are the product. Everyone else can get away with a slow page. You’re asking a woman to fall for a coat she can’t touch, using an image that hasn’t finished arriving.

She taps. White screen, then a grey box where the coat should be, then the coat itself coming down the page in strips.

By the time it settles she’s back in the app she came from, and she was never going to describe any of that to you as a reason.

Nobody types their way out of this one, which is why it stays broken for years. The photographs have to come down in size, the fonts have to stop arriving from three different companies, and every app bolted onto the storefront has to justify the delay it adds.

Fifth: the words a person reads

Last of all I read what the site actually says, which takes longer than the other four stops put together.

18.1% of these shops publish a blog, against 37% of small businesses.

I’m not going to lecture you about blogging. I’ve watched too many owners write four posts in January, run out of things to say by February, and leave the thing sitting there like an empty shelf.

But a shop with nothing of its own to say ends up competing on price with everybody else selling the same rack, and price is an argument the biggest store in the category always wins.

Whose voice is on your website at the moment? Yours, or the manufacturer’s?

What the run adds up to

Five stops, most of a Tuesday, and a trade that finishes holding a trophy nobody in it bought.

The lock is real and it matters, and I’d rather you had it than not. It just arrived in the box with the shopping cart, which means it tells me nothing at all about how much care went into the rest of your website.

Everything downstream of it needed a decision from an owner. That’s where the results get uneven.

Counting is where it shows worst. Fewer than half of these stores have anything on the site writing down what happened, and you can find out tonight which half you’re in.

Send me the page

Want the same five stops run on your own store? Send me the address and I’ll open it myself, in the order above, and tell you where it falls over.

A store takes me ten minutes and often earns me a conversation with the owner, so the audit doesn’t cost you a thing. Clothing brands are a decent slice of what I build, so weigh the offer with the bias attached.

Send it over. I’ll start where I always start, on the map, before I ever touch your homepage.