Despite the growing importance of e-Commerce in fashion retailing, many companies aren’t taking advantage of all the tools available to them, according to a study from Trendage, a platform that predicts trends for apparel brands and retailers. Only 13% of retailers use “Complete the Look” data to pair an item with other selections that would complement an outfit, and just 8% have “customers who viewed this also viewed” recommendations.
Up to 63% of e-Commerce fashion retailers offer wish lists and 56% have a mobile app, meaning a significant share of retailers still lack these seemingly ubiquitous staples. Other areas with room for improvement include:
- Live chat to field customer questions, which only 24% of retailers provide;
- The ability for customers to post photos of themselves in an outfit (8%); and
- Use of visual search and computer vision to provide customers with similar options (20%).
Additionally, the study found no standardization across body size charts, which presents the opportunity for a unified industry standard. Trendage identified 216 core body types each for women and men, underscoring that there are still plenty of ways for retailers to provide the personalization options consumers desire.
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“We didn’t set out to discover the number of human body types, but our data analysis made it clear that there’s tremendous variance in apparel, and it’s one of the reasons why 40% of all clothing bought online is returned,” said Vineet Chaudhary, CEO and Co-Founder at Trendage in a statement. “We always thought the notion of just four body types was absurd, and that nobody should be compared to an apple, pear, hourglass or rectangle.”
