14 eCommerce Store Features Inspired by Top Footwear Brands

If you want to improve your eCommerce store, this article will provide you with plenty of inspiration and examples of features you could add.

As these successful eCommerce stores demonstrate, you can significantly enhance your online shop by adding interesting features alongside your product pages.

For example, by promoting upcoming events that your visitors will find interesting, sharing high-value educational content, featuring your customers’ social media content, and showcasing style guides that highlight your products, you can transform your website into a valuable resource that visitors will eagerly return to.

Although this guide features stores that sell footwear, with a bit of adjustment, you should be able to apply these features to your store, regardless of what you’re selling.

14 Examples of Innovative Features from Successful eCommerce Stores

Among these examples, you’ll find many features that you can add to your store, including:

• Promoting upcoming events and creating product collections tailored to each event.
• Interactive sizing guides and quizzes to help customers choose the right product and reduce returns.
• Accepting product idea suggestions to give customers a sense of input into the product creation process.
• Publishing UGC from customers to provide social proof alongside links to the products being featured, so that customers can easily shop the look.
• Highlighting the causes you support to demonstrate your brand values.
• Sharing the stories and achievements of customers to build a community around your brand, provide inspiration, and demonstrate that your products can help shoppers achieve their goals.
• Publishing lookbooks so that customers can integrate your products into their existing wardrobe or other parts of their lives.
• Adding a regularly updated blog to your store to share helpful content, promote new products, and turn your store into a regular source of news for your niche.
• Partnering with popular brands to provide rewards for customers.
• Creating a marketplace to professionalize an existing secondhand market around your products.

While these features won’t all be suitable for your eCommerce store, many of them will and should be relatively easy to implement.

Gola

Gola has an “as seen on Instagram” section on their eCommerce store that displays UGC posted online featuring its products.

Visitors can scroll through the gallery, and if they click on a post, they’ll see a shoppable social media post with links to the products featured in the photo or video.

Adding shoppable social media posts to your store is the perfect way to share content of your products being used by relatable people. The chance of being featured on your website also encourages people to share your products with their followers, helping to spread the word about your brand and increase its visibility.

The Gola store also has a regularly updated blog. While this isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it isn’t something all brands do, and it remains an effective way to promote your store and build a community around it.

New Balance

An impressive tactic employed by New Balance is to highlight upcoming events that their target audience is likely to be interested in, and then showcase products from their store that are suitable for each event.

This approach works well to promote the other items runners might need, beyond the obvious shoes, including clothing and accessories suitable for the event. If you want to promote your product collections, this is a great way to do so.

Other valuable features of this footwear eCommerce store include a sizing guide and an FAQ that provides additional helpful information. As this content contains information about running styles, foot shapes, and more, it’s a resource that might get bookmarked and shared, helping to generate more visits to the store.

Another nice feature of the New Balance store is the page for submitting product ideas. This helps to give customers the feeling of being involved in the product design process and demonstrates that you value feedback from your audience.

Finally, New Balance promotes its athletic facility on its online store. While it might not be possible for you to do the same, having some kind of event, even if it’s online or at a rented space, can help bring your customers together and build brand loyalty.

Vivobarefoot

If, like Vivobarefoot, you’re selling a product that not everyone has experience buying (in this case, barefoot shoes), then adding as much information to your store as possible to help customers choose the right product and make a purchase with confidence is highly recommended.

Vivobarefoot achieves this by including an interactive foot assessment tool on its site. As customers can enter their email addresses during the assessment, it also serves as a valuable marketing tool for the company.

To increase customer satisfaction and generate repeat customers, Vivobarefoot also offers a wealth of content to support its customers, including online courses and other educational materials.

If you want to ensure your customers get the most out of the products you sell, increasing the chances of them coming back for more, consider publishing guides, advice, and tips on your blog or another part of your site.

Vivobarefoot also excels at building a community and support system for its customers. This helps customers benefit from their purchases and generate goodwill around the brand and its products.

The site also does a good job of highlighting problems the customer might not be aware of — in this case, that traditional shoes are harming their feet — and then selling them a solution for that problem.

If your products are solving a problem your target audience might not be aware of, or if your products are unfamiliar to most people, then emulating Vivobarefoot and publishing plenty of supporting content will help generate more sales.

JD Sports

JD Sports has a section on its eCommerce store’s blog where it shares user-generated content (UGC) from social media. Each post they publish features people wearing the products JD Sports sells, with links to those items at the store.

This visual marketing feature does an excellent job of showing influential people wearing the items they sell, as well as providing inspiration for customers on how to wear their products.

The exposure that can be achieved by being featured on the JD Sports blog also gives social media users an incentive to promote the brand to their audience. This, in turn, gives JD Sports more online exposure.

Adding a similar page to your store could be a good way to demonstrate essential social proof, add more visual marketing content to your site, and encourage your customers to start creating UGC around your products and store.

KEEN

At the KEEN footwear eCommerce store, customers will find information on how the company funds causes that are close to their hearts.

If your audience is likely to have sympathy for a specific cause, such as animal welfare, child poverty, environmental issues, or anything else, then promoting how you support these causes can make your brand more attractive while also doing good.

KEEN is effectively building its brand in other ways you could emulate, including publishing a detailed mission statement, creating content to promote the causes it supports, and sharing stories from its audience.

This type of content doesn’t have to be costly to produce. Reaching out to customers or looking for mentions on social media can help you gather information that can be turned into inspirational content for your store and its blog.

Norda

The Norda footwear store has a section on its site where it shares stories from people who’ve used their products. There’s also content that their target audience will be interested in, such as reports from relevant events. Interviews with people who use the items they sell are included, too.

Publishing this type of content helps demonstrate to potential customers that their products are suitable for the kind of events they’re interested in. Highlighting impressive stories from people who use the products also makes their brand more aspirational. Regularly publishing this type of content gives visitors a reason to return to the store, increasing the chances of them making a repeat purchase.

Regularly adding other types of content to your store, besides product pages, such as blog posts, is an excellent way to build your brand, generate repeat visits, and get exposure in search engines and social media.

Hoka

If you sell products that seem very similar at first glance but have been designed to solve different problems, then drawing inspiration from Hoka and publishing a detailed product finder is sure to help your customers find the right product.

Product quizzes and other similar eCommerce store features help reduce the frustration many customers feel when they’re confronted with an extensive product inventory. It also increases the chances that the customer will be happy with the purchase, as it will be well-matched to their goals and preferences.

You can find more examples of ways to help customers choose the right products in our guide to eCommerce quizzes.

Veja

Veja has positioned itself as the footwear brand for people who care about sustainability. To demonstrate this, they’ve published numerous pieces of content to support their claims.

Niching down or taking a specific stance to separate your brand from the competition is an effective strategy. However, it’s not enough to simply declare your differentiation; you have to demonstrate it. Veja has provided an excellent template on how to do so.

The company also publishes lookbooks on its store to show customers how to wear their products and find complementary items to match their initial purchase. If you want to provide inspiration to your customers while also cross-selling items and generating upsells, this approach can be very effective.

Saucony

Saucony is another footwear brand that organizes events that their customers are sure to find appealing. Their run clubs are promoted on their site and on Instagram, where members share content that mentions the brand and its products.

Saucony also connects with potential customers on other platforms its target market is likely to be using, such as Strava.

If your audience uses other apps specific to your niche, consider establishing a presence on those platforms to connect with them outside of your store.

Back at the Saucony eCommerce store, a fit finder is available to narrow down the product selection based on customer preferences to help shoppers find the perfect shoe.

Salomon

Images are an essential component of any successful product page design. However, Salomon takes their product photos to the next level by including auto-playing 3D images of their footwear.

If you want your product images to stand out, creating this type of content is sure to help.

While some brands include form-based product finders, customers can phone the Salomon hotline to get assistance with choosing the right product. If you don’t have the resources for this, then experimenting with the available AI-powered live chat apps could help you add a similar feature to your store.

Salomon also has a membership program that includes points, invites to in-person events, and exclusive product access.

While organizing in-person events can take a lot of work, they are an effective way to bring your community together, build your brand, and generate content for your store.

Rothys

The single product pages at the Rothys eCommerce store don’t necessarily have unique features. However, they’re very well designed and look like fully fledged landing pages.

This is a good example of how you can make a positive impact on your visitors by carefully considering the design of your pages and including all the essential components of high-performing product page design, without needing to create something entirely unique.

Platypus

Platypus has partnered with Qantas to offer its customers the opportunity to earn frequent flyer miles when purchasing their products.

Platypus and Qantas aren’t obvious partners. However, as nearly everyone takes flights from time to time, it’s an offer their customers are likely to appreciate.

Platypus shows that if you want to provide your customers with rewards, you don’t have to find a partner with a highly relevant brand. As long as they provide a product or service that most people use, it should still be an attractive offer that can help grow your business.

Allbirds

Allbirds includes a section on its product pages that provides potential customers with inspiration on what to wear with their new footwear. This does an effective job of helping visitors to feel comfortable about wearing Allbirds products.

If your products aren’t conventional or you want to attract new customers who haven’t bought the types of items you sell before, providing information on how to use or wear your products works really well to show them how they’d fit into their lives.

Allbirds also includes video content that explains the technology used in their shoes. This helps explain to customers that they aren’t just paying for the brand name but also the advanced features of the shoes and why they’re beneficial.

If you want to emulate Allbirds, try creating content that shows customers how they can integrate the products into their lives while also explaining the product features and benefits in a format that’s easy to consume.

Tecovas

As the Tecovas products are pretty niche, they’ve included information on what to wear with the boots they sell. They also make it very easy for customers to add complementary products to their cart, allowing shoppers to complete the look with a single order.

Adding a “complete the look” panel to each single product page is a user-friendly way to encourage customers to add more items to their cart and increase the average order value at your store.

This approach also helps customers feel more comfortable using your products, which in turn increases the likelihood of repeat business and makes your products more visible in the community.

Tecovas has also created buyer guides. This is an essential item to add to your store if you’re selling niche items that customers might be considering for the first time.

Another nice feature of this eCommerce store is the dedicated customer reviews page. Now, potential shoppers can view the extensive feedback this company has received to get a good idea of what others think of their products.

Tecovas has another nice feature, which is their buying and selling community. Through their Trading Post venture, people can buy and sell lightly worn Tecovas products.

While this may not be suitable for all types of products, if there’s already a demand for previously owned versions of the products you sell, you could step in and set up an official marketplace to help facilitate these sales in a more regulated manner.

What Features Could You Add to Your Store?

Many of the features of these footwear eCommerce stores can be valuable additions to other types of online shops.

As we’ve seen, there are plenty of ways to enhance your eCommerce store and turn it into a destination where people visit to do more than simply browse products and make a purchase.

By adding elements such as community sections, event promotion, UGC sharing, helpful documentation, product support content, and your brand’s values and contributions to wider social causes, you can turn your eCommerce store into a destination in itself.

As these types of features encourage people to come to your site to do more than just shop, you’ll be more likely to receive repeat visitors, social shares, and mentions online and offline.

With so many innovative eCommerce features in use today, you have plenty of options for upgrading your online store.