2015 was a boom year online for both fashion retailer Zara and its owner Inditex, which also owns Massimo Dutti. In that year, online sales grew by 16% and off the back of this, Zara has ramped up its app presence by making great strides and showing all European retailers how it should be done.
Its website is one of the fastest around, with the average load time for all of Zara’s domains coming in at 3s – with its UK website loading fastest at 2s and its Hungarian site at 2.8s. For this reason, the site managed to achieve a near perfect score of 96 out of 100 in the IREU500 research.
The company runs 16 websites across 16 countries and each offers click and collect shopping for each country. But it is Zara’s app that really takes the prize. It has been beautifully designed, with easy navigation and clear, plentiful images that show clothes from all angles – all of which are zoomable.
Currently available only in the UK, France and Germany, the app does has limited reach. However, it does offer a range of great basic features, such as a scanner and location services and multiple ways to share what you have found. Since these basics are missing from many other retailer apps, their inclusion helps mark Zara out as a clear winner.
The app can also select different languages, is transactional, offers notification of daily deals and allows local store stock checks.
It features a centralised account so that when logged in, the user can move across channels while retaining their basket and settings. However, what really sets its apart here is that new customers are taken straight to the checkout rather than having to create an account before they can buy.
Zara cleverly gets around this by asking for all that information as part of the checkout process, then simply requests a password to set up an account after the checkout is complete. This removes one of the biggest barriers to getting users to sign up and buy.
