Clothing image in the e-commerce industry plays an important role in providing customers with information. This paper divides clothing images into two groups: pure clothing images and dressed clothing images. Targeting small and medium-sized clothing companies or merchants, it compares traditional machine learning and deep learning models to determine suitable models for each group. For pure clothing images, the HOG+SVM algorithm with the Gaussian kernel function obtains the highest classification accuracy of 91.32% as compared to the Small VGG network. For dressed clothing images, the CNN model obtains a higher accuracy than the HOG+SVM algorithm, with the highest accuracy rate of 69.78% for the Small VGG network. Therefore, for end-users with only ordinary computing processors, it is recommended to apply the traditional machine learning algorithm HOG+SVM to classify pure clothing images. The classification of dressed clothing images is performed using a more efficient and less computationally intensive lightweight model, such as the Small VGG network.