Industry research: fashion & apparel: online market analysis

The fashion market share within the top 20

Using a Share of Voice analysis (SOV), we reveal the proportions in the online market of the fashion industry. In this Share of Voice, we bring together a total of 6.152 fashion-related keywords in a snapshot, to see what the top 20 of the search results looks like for each keyword, in this case on 15 May 2023. The summary of those different top 20 positions takes shape in a plot, in which we can see:

• Which websites ranked most often in the top 20 for these 6.152 terms;
• For what percentage of the 6.152 words each website was indexed (y-axis), and;
• What the average position of the indexed keywords was (x-axis).

The larger the circle in the SOV, the more fashion-related search volume is associated with that website in total. The hypothetical ideal in an SOV is in the top right. A website in that position is indexed for 100% of the relevant keywords and ranks for all terms in position 1.

6.251 fashion keywords, 16 themes, 1 Share of Voice

The 6.152 fashion-related keywords cover a broad range of 16 relevant themes, from children's clothing to shoes and from jumpsuits to fashion brands. It is therefore to be expected that the top of the market consists of large players that can target different market segments thanks to their broad range. This is also reflected in the Share of Voice:

Share of Voice fashion, click and drag to zoom in further on a specific area, click on ‘reset zoom’ to return to the full overview. The SOV is easier to read on a PC. 

The websites associated with the highest search volume and that are indexed best and highest are Zalando.nl (which has as many as 73,6% of the keywords in the top 20 ranks, with an average position of 5Wehkamp.nl and Bol.com. All these parties offer a complete fashion and accessories experience. Zalando is the only webshop that specialises exclusively in clothing and shoes.

The top 20 of the market consists predominantly of websites offering multiple brands, enabling them to target more different keywords and capture more search volume, but there are also several online shops that sell exclusively (or predominantly) their own brand. In the latter category, H&M in particular performs well, with more than 25% of the search terms indexed at an average position of 9,4, although the webshop has recently also expanded its range to include other brands within its own group.

Knowing where the shoe pinches

For some niches, it may make more sense to look at a more specific part of the market. For example, as the owner of a footwear webshop, it is less important to know how the proportions are distributed across the fashion world as a whole, including clothing, and far more interesting to understand what the online landscape of the footwear segment looks like. For that purpose, we zoom in on the Share of Voice of the footwear sector, with 1.711 terms within this theme.

Less is (sometimes) more

With a Share of Voice, you can zoom in as far as you like. For example, if you want to start an online shop that specialises in  selling trousers. By of the 775 search terms from the fashion tracking related to trousers a SOV when running a SOV, you can see at a glance who your biggest online competitors in this area are:

On the y-axis, we can see the changes between those 2 time points for each website in the indexing percentage. The x-axis shows the percentage changes in the websites’ average positions.

What is striking is that there have actually been no shifts in the indexing rate: fashion websites in the top 20 have barely appeared for more or fewer search terms compared with before the Google update. For the majority of fashion websites, the average position also remained virtually unchanged (with differences of at most -2% to +4%), with the exception of 2 outliers: Bol.com Zalando.nl

This development is noteworthy in the context of the Google Core Update. Although Google itself released little information about the content of the update, the general assumption is that it related to E-E-A-T and the quality of content. Neither outlier wins any beauty contest when it comes to content, but at category-page level, Zalando makes a little more effort than Bol.com. Across the domain, however, we can regard Bol.com as more E-E-A-T-worthy, with an extensive ‘About us’ section that is entirely absent from Zalando.