Fashion 2.0: virtual try-ons, the cure-all for e-commerce!
Today, in our Expertise section, we have decided to tell you about this article in English from the BOF, tweeted and retweeted any number of times and republished on Magazine M at Monde.fr.
According to the statistics, between 20 and 40% of the clothes bought online are sent back because of size problems. Which costs e-commerce sites millions, as you can well imagine. Plenty of start-ups around the world, Fitizzy among them, are hard at work solving this problem.
One question does arise, though: “is the technical approach the best solution?”
Having to send back the long-awaited purchase you made online a week earlier is often a crushing experience. Picture it: the postman turns up at your door, hands you the parcel and, in your impatience, you dash off to try it on… except that the pretty polka-dot blouse in question does not suit you one bit, it is far too tight, and you come within a whisker of splitting it as you raise your arms to the sky :/ You wrap it back up nicely with a resigned sigh and head off to the post office with a heavy heart, because you already know you are in for an endless queue…
No! We are not exaggerating one bit! When you love fashion and you care (or do not care) about how you look, that sort of experience really is thoroughly unpleasant!
And it is every bit as unpleasant an experience for online retailers, by the way (back in 2012, Slate.fr was already writing about it). Over the last few years, fashion on the internet has turned out to be the fastest-growing market and the second biggest in terms of size, behind electronics.
The problem: returns caused by the wrong size cost millions, not only because of the lost sales but also because of shipping and handling costs. And, generally speaking, returned goods cannot be put back into circulation.
That is where start-ups like ours come in: we have developed an algorithm to analyse information about measurements and advise shoppers on the sizes they should choose so that the garment fits them perfectly. Others have developed virtual fitting rooms that reproduce the customer’s body shape and show how they will look in the garment they have chosen.
Millions of dollars, from strategic investors and finance houses, have been released to invest in a promising but, all in all, overcrowded niche.
The journalist writes: “Nobody has yet managed to find the miracle cure… Why?” She probably does not know about Fitizzy, our app that lets you enter your exact measurements using a tape measure we send you free of charge. It costs the user nothing but a few minutes to take their measurements… And we have thought of everything, since we provide explanatory videos on our site that are fun to watch and turn the “chore” into something enjoyable.
From there, our aim is to get users actively involved in this technological experience. The keenest and most loyal of them help us enormously, in that their feedback allows us to improve our service. Users matter a great deal to us: the more of them there are, the better it is for us. The outlook is rather positive, thanks to major internationally renowned retail chains such as Promod, our recent partner, which are bringing us more and more users.
For websites, integrating the Fitizzy widget is, what is more, cheap and easy. In the age of fast fashion everything moves very quickly, brands are multiplying and so is the number of products. At Fitizzy the feeds are automated, so it is easy to gather the information needed to give sound, tailored advice and deliver results that are effective and relevant. The marketing built around the app obviously has to be effective enough to encourage shoppers to adopt this new way of buying.
We can also see that customer ratings, reviews, size charts and detailed product pages are an alternative to the apps out there, since an opinion on how a garment fits ultimately remains very subjective. But all of that data stays vague, and a complementary app such as Fitizzy then becomes essential if the customer is to be entirely satisfied.
So could it be us who have found the miracle solution…? 🙂
If you already use Fitizzy, do not forget to update your measurements — it will take five minutes at the very most.
And for any other web users reading this article who would like to get to know our app, head over to www.fitizzy.com to discover our service, create your morphological profile and use Fitizzy across all of our partner sites!!
Have a lovely day and see you tomorrow!
Marie.