E-commerce today allows anyone to have an online store, but one online fashion retailer has stood out from the rest. NastyGal.com is a global online destination for fashion-forward, free-thinking girls. In 2006, founder Sophia Amoruso started an eBay store selling a highly curated selection of vintage pieces. Today, NastyGal has evolved from a ludicrously simple platform to a $100 million business.
NastyGal builds on these e-commerce features to deliver a successful online shopping experience:
- Ubiquity: being able to leverage technology to let everybody access you product whenever and wherever.
- Global Reach: technology reaches across national boundaries.
- Richness: a combination of high quality modelling photos with distinct “lookbooks” featuring trending styles.
- Interactivity: the ability to “Live Chat” with a sales representative at any time in seconds.
Social media’s role in the e-commerce world is also key in driving success. Whether it was a crazy vintage piece, a quote, or a behind-the-scenes photo, Nasty Gal has worked hard to create the best and most compelling images, words, and overall “share-able” content for their customers. Amoruso uses social media to listen to her customers, and if they’re not happy she hears it from the ground up.
Nasty Gal would have surely failed had it been her goal to grow a business to the size it is today. When you begin with the finish line in mind, you miss all the fun stuff along the way. The better approach is to tweak and grow, tweak and grow. Amoruso calls it the incremental potential. In e‑commerce, you have to get everything right — from the marketing to the product descriptions to the checkout process.
With sites such as eBay or shopify.ca many aspiring e-commerce entrepreneurs could learn from Amoruso’s humble beginnings and take online retailing to the next level.