Empowering Footwear Retail Success

It didn’t take a pandemic to make the value of online marketplaces clear to the B2B fashion wholesale community on FashionGo – accessible via a website where retailers can procure new stock from virtually anywhere at any time. The number one B2B online fashion wholesale marketplace has linked retail buyers and wholesale sellers in a one-stop shop that has provided a virtual storefront and the ultimate productdiscovery hub for retailers since 2002, when it was founded by fashion wholesalers in Los Angeles.

But as online business took off amid lockdowns, FashionGo has become an even more vital procurement resource and e-commerce force throughout the fashion industry. About 1 million registered users access the site at fashiongo.net to buy over 3 million products from thousands of brands across 12 categories. These categories include women’s, men’s, and children’s apparel, along with accessories, home, beauty products—and footwear.

In fact, footwear is quickly becoming one of the platform’s key categories. “FashionGo’s numbers for footwear product listings and orders have each shot up by about 125 percent in the last several years,” according to Paul Lee, CEO of NHN Global, parent company of FashionGo. “Footwear is the number two mostasked-about category from FashionGo retail buyers. One of our bigger initiatives is continued strategic expansion into important categories where there is demand, and footwear is one of them.”

He likens FashionGo to physical trade events or other market settings where the fashion community gathers to make connections, discover new products, reach informed purchasing decisions, and execute transactions. “Except we’re online so we don’t have the restrictions of geography, business hours, or scheduled shows, offering greater accessibility,” he says. “B2B engagement and discovery is 24/7, creating more business opportunities during the year when markets are not held and at hours that are convenient for retail buyers, as we never close.”

FashionGo only requires retail buyers to submit their business documents once at sign-up to show proof of their retail business. Once approved, retail buyers do not need to submit business documentations to each and every brand in order to view products and place orders.

Signing up as a buyer on FashionGo is completely free and provides easy ways to discover new or favorite brands, find daily new arrivals and best sellers, and obtain data-driven purchasing tools to make informed purchase decisions.

“We’re a tech company that happens to be in fashion, not the other way around,” Lee says. “But we infuse that tech DNA with over 20 years of experience and expertise in wholesale fashion. We prioritize bringing innovative tools and solutions that are most relevant and impactful to the B2B fashion community.”

Convenient tools include Style Match+, which enables reverse-image search capabilities across FashionGo’s millions of products. Simply upload an image of a specific shoe style and instantly find the exact or similar style on the platform.

Other solutions include Best of Best, a collection of the top-selling products on FashionGo that updates in real time. FashionGo Live is an engaging livestream shopping experience that’s broadcast each week for brands to highlight new arrivals, exclusive deals, or best sellers while allowing retail buyers to ask questions and shop products in real time. AI-based recommendations—old hat to FashionGo, Lee says—empower buyer discovery by showing products that are most relevant to them.

Convenience is also within FashionGo’s core, allowing orders across multiple brands to be processed at one checkout, shipped together, and tracked from a centralized location. (The platform handles both in-stock immediate items and preorders.)

FashionGo is also creating new business opportunities to footwear retailers through its own Dropshipping service, FashionGo Dropshipping, which is available to all registered buyers for free, giving them maximum merchandising leverage with minimal risk for inventory. Retailers can list any footwear product and when a sale is made on their own e-commerce store, FashionGo Dropshipping fulfills the order on the retailer’s behalf. FashionGo Dropshipping has been a natural progression for retailers to introduce new types of products and categories to their shoppers.

Lastly on security, FashionGo takes pride in its safe payments and antifraud measures by partnering with Stripe. Through Stripe, FashionGo is subjected to and abides by the most stringent payment compliance and does not hold sensitive financial information such as credit card data, giving confidence to buyers who make wholesale purchases on FashionGo.

“This year, our main initiative is strategic expansion through different product categories including footwear, accessories, home, and more,” Lee says. “Through this expansion, our goal is to open up new business opportunities for both wholesale brands and retail buyers with more new products to shop and sell. He also sees FashionGo’s success as a shared benefit: “We want to continue providing retail buyers with valuable experiences and tangible solutions that alleviate pain points in their procurement process, and provide more analytical tools that allow retailers to make the best possible merchandising and business decisions.”