New Tech trends that will enhance the fashion e-commerce shopping

The virtual shopping assistants

Consumer preferences and trends especially in the fashion industry are highly volatile, making it imperative for fashion e-commerce companies to go for a personalized shopping approach and customer-centric merchandising. Mimicking the sales assistants in a physical store, the fashion e-commerce companies can implement AI-based chatbots as the new virtual sales representatives.  These AI chatbots or virtual representatives are computer programs that simulate a human conversation through chatting and messaging. When a customer arrives at the website, the AI chatbots engage with the site visitor in a conversation, first introducing themselves as a chatbot and shooting an array of questions that determines what the customer is searching for. After, knowing the preferences, the AI chatbots can directly take the customer to browse collections in the catalogue. The virtual assistants can provide suggestions of styling, selection of outfits, customer service, and product discovery. The conversational tone of finding products on the website makes the filter feature an obsolete one. 

Virtual Trial Rooms

The fashion e-commerce industry is plagued by high returns that can be blamed on the inability to detect the right size of apparel bought. The long queue before trial room can be tackled by leveraging AR (augmented reality) technology that enables a virtual fitting room. In a virtual fitting room, the shoppers can click a picture of themselves and drag the chosen outfits that are AR filters, and create a unique style. Multiple collages of every outfit, style and fitting can be created for comparison and understand what works best. 

An alternate virtual fitting room can also be created by including 3D models. Virtually a 3D model can be created by mimicking a shopper’s exact body measurements. Once the 3D model is made, it is a replica of the shopper itself, from where we can drag various outfits to the 3D model created. 

 A virtual fitting room allows shoppers to experiment with various looks and apparel combinations, which in offline trial room is limited to a few apparels. 

Self-Checkout Kiosks

Online businesses are adopting omnichannel strategies to fully leverage the supply chain and better utilization of inventory. Unlike online shopping, billing of items in an offline store consumed a significant amount of time, leaving the shoppers annoyed. In times when customers are seeking instant gratification, the time taken for billing can be reduced by keeping self-checkout kiosks. Self-checkout kiosks enable quicker checkout by allowing the customer to complete billing in simpler steps and without any intervention of humans. 

Blockchain Technology

Besides finance and digital currencies, blockchain technology is gaining ground in the fashion ecommerce industry as well. Customers often vent their resentment on social media of not receiving genuine products that eventually erodes the brand image. To counter fake products or products of substandard quality, blockchain technology in combination with physical RFID chips or QR codes, companies can track the multiple stages involved in sourcing the raw materials to distribution of finished products to the end consumer. It ensures that the entire process right from manufacturing to a finished product is performed in an ethical and secured manner by monitoring in between processes. It induces transparency since blockchain’s characteristic of distributed ledger can be accessed by manufacturers, suppliers, and vendors. The ledger contains a detailed history of the product’s origin to where it is presently.