As the proportion of fashion sold online increases, it seems inevitable that up to one-in-four bricks and mortar clothes shops will disappear inside eight years. But it could happen even more quickly.

It’s no secret how quickly online apparel sales are growing - it’s one of the very few ecommerce categories showing double-digit growth every year.  In 2000, only 1% of garments were sold online; in 2011 it was 12%, and today it’s probably 14% - one in every seven items.

And yet fashion remains one of the most difficult categories for online sales: customers can neither feel, nor touch, nor try on garments before purchase.  So while more than half of computers and almost half of books are sold online, online fashion sales lag far behind: as a percentage, almost four times fewer garments are sold online than computers or books.  However, once apparel retailers learn to overcome the disadvantages they face online today, the growth of their online sales will be enormous.

But while the proportion of clothing sold online increases at dramatic rates, total apparel sales are at a comparative standstill: the annual growth rate is about 3%.  People are not buying more clothes, they’ve simply changed the purchase channels.  At current and projected growth rates, more than 25% of garments will be sold online by 2020 – less than eight years’ time.  However, as the sales of computers and books demonstrated, an unexpected tipping point in customer behaviour could increase the apparel ecommerce growth rate suddenly and substantially.

For example I recently heard about a company from Finland, which has developed technology that lets you feel a material as it is displayed on a smartphone’s screen.  Rumour is that it has licensed the technology to Apple to be perhaps incorporated in the next version of the iPad.  This is exactly the sort of innovation that is going to help fashion etailers to boost their sales conversions, because it helps them to overcome one of the factors that causes shoppers to hesitate before they buy.

When one-in-four garments are sold online, sales in traditional stores will decline inevitably. Like bookshops, the clothing shops will get smaller: just look at what has happened to bookshops in the UK. And when did you last visit a travel agent?  Apparel retailers will need to adopt and change. The good news: three-in-four clothes shops may remain open.

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