Apparel brands lose track of 59.8% of word-of-mouth sales
Clothing brands, the largest vertical in the index and the one where social discovery is most heavily instrumented. This page covers 295,424 post-purchase responses across 318 apparel merchants, comparing what customers said about how they found a brand against the source each store’s analytics recorded for the same order.
- Responses
- 295,424
- Merchants
- 318
- Orders with no tracked source
- 56.4%
- Of those, said “don’t know”
- 8.5%
Among these merchants, when a customer named word of mouth the source was missing 59.8% of the time. When they named Facebook — a platform that attaches a click identifier to every visit — the figure fell to 50.0%. That is a 1.20× difference within the same set of stores.
How often analytics loses each channel
The share of purchases in this vertical that reached the store’s analytics with no usable source recorded, by the channel the customer named. This is a rate within each channel, not a share of all orders.
| Channel | Untracked | Responses | Rate | Merchants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Press / editorial | 1,196 | 1,584 | 75.5% | 27 |
| 1,693 | 2,553 | 66.3% | 26 | |
| YouTube | 4,334 | 7,175 | 60.4% | 99 |
| Creator / influencer | 2,481 | 4,121 | 60.2% | 43 |
| Word of mouth | 35,964 | 60,144 | 59.8% | 258 |
| AI assistant | 1,474 | 2,473 | 59.6% | 26 |
| TikTok | 5,827 | 10,026 | 58.1% | 138 |
| 33,870 | 59,429 | 57.0% | 252 | |
| Search | 29,290 | 54,715 | 53.5% | 230 |
| Retail / in store | 1,621 | 3,084 | 52.6% | 26 |
| 27,686 | 55,381 | 50.0% | 186 |
Channels not shown, because fewer than 25 merchants in this vertical, or fewer than 1,000 responses, stand behind them: Marketplace (9), Advertising (unspecified) (19), Pinterest (26), Returning customer (16), Online (unspecified) (4), Other social (14). They exist in the data and are excluded rather than reported thinly.
Method
Merchants were assigned to a vertical from the products appearing on their orders; those whose product mix was ambiguous were excluded rather than assigned. Only responses attached to a completed order are included, collected between 18 September 2025 and 18 September 2026. A vertical is published only where at least 50 merchants contributed, and a channel row within it only where at least 25 of those merchants and 1,000 responses stand behind it. That row threshold is lower than the 50 used on the all-merchant table, because a vertical of this size cannot reach it; every row shows its own merchant count so the difference is visible rather than assumed.
Stores using Zigpoll are not a random sample of apparel retail, and these figures describe that population rather than the market as a whole. Order values are recorded in their original presentment currency and are not exchange-rate adjusted, which is why no revenue figures appear here. Full method and the all-merchant tables: the Attribution Index.
Citing this
Free to reproduce with attribution (CC BY 4.0).
Zigpoll Attribution Index, September 2026 — Apparel. 295,424 post-purchase survey responses across 318 apparel merchants. https://www.zigpoll.com/attribution-index/2026-09/apparel
For the underlying tables or a cut not shown here, contact [email protected].
Other verticals
- Home & garden — 175 merchants, 413,175 responses
- Jewellery & accessories — 152 merchants, 253,651 responses
- Supplements & health — 129 merchants, 225,203 responses
- Beauty & personal care — 190 merchants, 186,931 responses
- Food & beverage — 278 merchants, 178,530 responses
- Baby & kids — 75 merchants, 102,251 responses
- Sports & outdoor — 65 merchants, 36,692 responses
- Pet — 59 merchants, 22,578 responses
