fashionette: Checkout upgrade in the luxury segment

fashionette AG is a leading European data-driven e-commerce group for premium and luxury fashion accessories. It combines its many years of industry expertise with sound data analysis know-how, and has developed a proprietary IT and data platform on this basis that makes its possible for each customer to experience an individualised shopping experience.

Since its foundation in 2008, the brand has successfully established itself and is now one of the most popular online shops in the German-speaking countries. In 2021, the company recorded a 40.3% higher net turnover than in the previous year. Here the facts at a glance:

fashionette employs an impressive proportion of women: They make up over two-thirds of its workforce. In the social media, the company also scores highly: The high level of customer satisfaction is primarily due to prompt delivery as well as the short customer service response times.

What were we able to do for fashionette?

It is enormously important for an online shop that sells upmarket premium and luxury goods  to offer shoppers their preferred payment option in order to keep the cart abandonment rate at the checkout as low as possible. In the luxury segment, a spectrum of payment types that is as broad as possible is therefore not also a luxury but pure necessity.

That is why fashionette brought Ratepay on board in 2014. We were charged with the addition of further payment options to the checkout:

• Purchase by Open Invoice via direct debit for Austria
• Purchase by Open Invoice for Switzerland
• Instalments for Germany and Austria

Three roll-outs in six years – or a living example of true partnership

When we came on board, the fashionette online shop was based on the shop system Magneto’s platform . In 2014, the stock management system and the order processing were integrated in Magento. So we simply linked our payment solutions to Magneto and then transferred them to the live business during the subsequent roll-out phase.

However, a second roll-out was already imminent: In 2017, the ERP system MS Dynamics NAV was implemented at fashionette, which meant that all of the existing systems had to be checked for their compatibility with the new data formats, and to be respectively updated. This roll-out again included the challenge of adapting our payment solutions to the new IT infrastructure.

As soon as we had successfully managed this, Magneto was taken down and replaced with an in-house shop software developed especially for fashionette. In this context, we also ensured that the Ratepay payment solution works at the checkout and in other processes.

So by now, the third generation of our payment solutions is already in operation at fashionette. Time for a quick résumé…

New customer groups for the premium and luxury segment

Since its introduction, particularly the Ratepay option of payment in instalments has become increasingly more popular and is selected at the checkout by a consistently high proportion of customers. With this option, fashionette successfully addressed especially younger customers for whom certain premium and luxury segment products were simply too expensive to purchase via payment on invoice or by direct debit. fashionette also recorded fuller carts, as the option of being able to pay in instalments reduces the level of hesitation when it comes to higher sum totals at the checkout.

In actual fact, in 2021, fashionette’s net turnover also increased by 40.3%, compared to the previous year. This was primarily due to 31.3% more orders and 32.4% more active customers, compared to the previous year.

Less work for the team leaves them more time for the essential

The introduction of the payment solutions has also led to a positive trend on the operational level . The cooperation with Ratepay has reduced the workload of the Risk & Payment team headed by Laura Vogelsang. Everyone now has more time to spend on the essential, and more headspace for new ideas that drive the company ahead and bring new growth.

Rising turnover

For the remainder of 2022, fashionette expects a further net turnover growth of 16-21%. Although the GERACH region continues to be fashionette’s main market in geographical terms, the world beyond the German-speaking countries is also continuing to gain in importance. We are proud of the fact that we have contributed to this success with our long-term partnership with fashionette, and are already looking forward to the next roll-out phase.

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