https://journaljemt.com/index.php/JEMT <p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Journal of Economics, Management and Trade (ISSN:&nbsp;2456-9216)</strong> publishes manuscripts with valuable insight to research, ideas and strategies of economics, management and trade. By not excluding papers based on novelty, this journal facilitates the research and wishes to publish papers as long as they are technically correct and scientifically motivated. The journal also encourages the submission of useful reports of negative results. This is a quality controlled, OPEN peer-reviewed, open-access INTERNATIONAL journal.</p> Journal of Economics, Management and Trade en-US Journal of Economics, Management and Trade 2456-9216 https://journaljemt.com/index.php/JEMT/article/view/1364 <p>Fashion retailers face a critical sequencing dilemma in their digital transformation journey, with 87% of analytics efforts failing to bridge technical investment to concrete business results. This paper addresses this analytics value gap by introducing a three-stage evolution model that allows fashion retailers to build analytics capability systematically to maximize business impact. Based on marketplace data including 5,381 fashion items and analyzed through ROI calculation and machine-learning comparison, we show that the data quality foundation (Stage 1) generates exceptionally high returns, at a ratio of 17.5:1 in ROI. The returns in subsequent stages are lower with 8.0:1 in Stage 2 and 4.5:1 in Stage 3. Our modeling experiment reveals that sequential progression through maturity stages is critical, as skipping stages leads to performance degradation in forecasting accuracy. The framework provides fashion executives with an evidence-based roadmap for digital transformation, emphasizing sequential capability building and strategic resource allocation. Results also reveal that premium prices correlate positively with social engagement, while discounts show no strong association with product ratings, questioning standard markdown practices. We provide implementation guidance with clear transition criteria to support fashion retailers in evolving from analytics adoption to intelligence leadership.</p> Selin Kurt Ali Raza Selda Kurt Meriem Hamadi Copyright (c) 2025 Author(s). The licensee is the journal publisher. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2025-11-03 2025-11-03 31 11 1 11 10.9734/jemt/2025/v31i111364