Poor fit is one of the top reasons customers return merchandise--and that's why fit technology ought to be the next tool you spring for in the new year.
The good news: Fit-tech providers have been multiplying. Amazon this week became the latest mega-corporation to roll out fit technology. Its Fit Insights Tool, which uses artificial intelligence to give shoppers personalized clothing size recommendations and insights, leverages data from anonymized orders, reviews, returns, and product size chart data--and the e-commerce giant expects to roll out the technology to Amazon partners, including third-party sellers.
Google had already launched its own AI-powered sizing tools in June. The Mountain View, California-based search giant released generative AI models that can depict what select articles of clothing would look like on multiple body sizes and skin tones. Brands that sell through Google Merchant Center and meet high-quality image requirements are automatically opted into the tech. In 2022, Walmart launched a similar tool thanks to its acquisition of the virtual fitting room startup Zeekit.
Such tools are just a natural use case for AI in online commerce. With size recommendations, customers are more likely to purchase and keep products, said Apoorv Chaudhri, director of computer vision and machine learning at Amazon Fashion in a press release. After all, among U.S. shoppers who returned an online purchase in 2022, 75 percent said they did so because of poor or incorrect fit, data from Statista shows.
Private companies adapting the technology for them are already starting to see benefits. Boston-based True Fit counts retailers Lord and Taylor, Madewell, and PacSun among the clients using its AI-powered fit recommendations. Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based Fit:Match.ai is also making hay with fit tech. The five-year-old startup creates "digital twins" with AI to help both in-person and online customers of retail brands, which have included Savage X Fenty and Fabletics, find more accurate size recommendations--which the company says can lead to an 80 percent drop in returns.
Returns, after all, are one of retail's biggest pain points. According to the National Retail Federation, customers returned a staggering $743 billion in merchandise in 2023, which threatens to spur logistical challenges and excess inventory. The NRF reported $816 billion in returned merchandise in 2022, but because of a change in the organization's methodology, this cannot be compared with 2023 numbers. Returns cost retailers an average of 27 percent of an item's purchase price, according to a 2023 report by the reverse logistics company Optoro.
The best solution is to prevent returns from happening in the first place, Shannon Wu-Lebron, corporate vice president of global retail industry and strategy at the supply chain company Blue Yonder, previously told Inc.
Amazon Fashion's Fit Insights Tool attempts to do just that--and the company says that it will also help brands gain valuable feedback on their product sizing through the data it will aggregate around a product's reviews and rates of return, which they can use to inform their merchandising and even design strategies going forward.
Of course, it's still early days for the tech--and early adopters may well experience some growing pains along the way. Privacy concerns may hold customers back from using the technology, limiting the benefits of such an investment.
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