Deep diving into the technologies that contributed to last year’s holiday e-commerce success stories and woes
The holiday season means a lot in both the fashion e-commerce industry. It is a time of extravagant shopping, numerous business stresses, and the opportunity to test new systems or technologies. As with sales, there are clear winners and losers amongst these technologies shown by their performance during the season. While new innovations are often tested prior, the pressure of the holiday season provides a more rigorous examination of their quality.
As an early holiday gift, we’re bringing you our analysis of the best (and worst) technological developments last season had to offer. Technology has proven a game changer in retail, but just as amazing innovations can save us time and money some end up wasting it. We cannot forget that bad ideas often sound like good ideas. That is how they secure investment and dedication. It is not until they enter the market that we come to see the flaws behind the “brilliance”.
In the spirit of the holidays, we will focus on newer e-commerce technologies still in the process of being fully adopted by the industry. AI solutions such as product tagging and product photo recognition are clear winners in their own right, but have proven themselves to be essential and require the necessary references that far exceed a subsection in this seasonal snapshot.
Without further ado, we present the best (and the worst) of holiday season fashion e-commerce technology.
The Best: A Must-Have for Your e-commerce Holiday Checklist
Virtual Fitting Rooms for a Superior User Experience
The pandemic has changed many aspects of our lives, especially in regards to the way we shop. This has proven a blessing and a curse for e-commerce retail businesses, who have experienced an increase of sales (which can be profitable), but also overwhelming.
While online shopping provides several benefits such as lower prices, wider selection of products, and less time consuming shopping, there remains a major drawback.
Fitting rooms, or more broadly the opportunity to see how a product looks on yourself, seems to have been an aspect lost in our virtual conversion, until now.
According to the Washington Post, the demand for virtual try-ons has tripled since the coronavirus pandemic took hold, and businesses have been quick to answer the call. The personalized shopping experience of directly trying on products has been mimicked online to increase shoppers’ overall user experience. From cosmetics to clothes, seeing is believing in the minds of several brands who have invested significant portions of their already strained budgets to provide consumers with the familiarity of product try ons.
MAC Cosmetics, who had already installed virtual try-on mirrors at 120 stores and counting, is investing heavily in technology that allows shoppers to try on lipstick, eye shadow and foundation by webcam. Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger, are two more brands preparing to launch the world’s largest virtual fitting room, with hundreds of thousands of pants, tops and coats that shoppers can drag onto photos of themselves.
Supporting these brands is Zeekit, a company whose name means “chameleon” in Hebrew, the driving force behind this revolutionary technology. Co-founder of Zeekit, Yael Vizel was a captain in the Israeli air force, using telecommunications software to map the Earth’s topographies. She came to realize the similarities between the human body and topography, stating, “You can add on any clothing item as though it’s an intelligence map, and you’ve got a holy grail of online fashion.”
While concerns exist regarding the biometric data companies will gain from such virtual ventures, the future seems optimistic as more and more brands adopt virtual fitting rooms to improve their online consumer experience.
The Worst: Technology Not Yet Ready for the Future of Retail Experience
Keeping Drones out of Homes — Avoiding Revenue Loss
The shipping process is one of the added complexities of e-commerce retail in comparison to in-store shopping. Low shipping prices have become a must for the frugal shopper, with shipping another variable that can make or break sales. Traditional, tested and true shipping methods are costly even though they are most efficient and are still far from undelayable. Warehouse workers and truck drivers are just a few of the many employees required to maintain this method of operation.
With last season’s extreme online shopping demand, fashion retailers felt more pressure than ever to update their shipping methods. Enter the ambitious (and soon to be shown practical) idea of drone deliveries. Drones have proved to be a valuable technology. Their adoption into military strategy has had large scale effects on the world. But dropping bombs is a lot different than dropping packages.
A major issue with drone deliveries seems to be that the packages don’t have safe landing areas. Drones can’t exactly open mailboxes, porches tend to be covered, and back yards can have dogs that are not too fond of strangers from the sky. Some companies have devised a method of parachute delivery, but this is unreliable and much too dependent on weather conditions.
Power lines and range issues are still very serious issues that have yet to be solved on the massive scale required for shipping adaptation. Add to that weather impacts, drone abuse (human interference), or package theft, and this supposedly cost saving technology could end up a mess of replacement fees, repairs and product insurance payouts. For unlucky shoppers, this could mean that the brand new pair of shoes they’ve been waiting for never come, fraying long-built brand loyalty as a result.
While drone delivery systems are predicted to be a part of the new normal of online fashion shopping by 2050, it’s clear that there are ways to go before full implementation is possible.
Not all Technological Adaptations are Equal
While technology has proven to be a major part of succeeding in fashion e-commerce, it is not without its risks. Being an early adopter of the right technology can give your business a headstart for years to come, however choosing the wrong innovation can be a costly and embarrassing mistake. Technology is expensive and takes time to perfect. Luckily the odds here are better than in Vegas as long as you commit the time to research and understand what you are getting yourself into.
Learn how your fashion business can win the 2021 holiday season by implementing automatic translation tools for multi-lingual shoppers.
