Berk Ozer, co-founder, FalconAI
Imagine walking into a luxury store and having the best sales assistant or stylist accompany you on your purchasing journey. Immediately, you are offered a pair of jeans or a dress that perfectly match your style, body type, hair color, skin tone, and even your personality.
Upon leaving the store, you are more than satisfied with your purchase because you know that, fashion-wise, you have made the best buying decision. You also know that you will look terrific for any occasion because the outfits you chose were customized specifically meet your functional and emotional needs.
A Curated Shopping Experience with Fashion Consultants
Online styling services such as Stitch Fix provide personalized services by delivering a box of a curated selection of clothing, shoes, and accessories into a person’s home.
The core premise of Stitch Fix is to deliver boxes of fashion items—handpicked by a stylist—based on the client’s style profile including price range, size, types of styles the person is most likely to identify with, and a delivery date.
According to a report by Boston Consulting, retailers who have implemented personalization strategies in their e-commerce websites see sales increase of 6-10 percent, two to three times faster than other retailers.
While getting a personalized experience in retail is hardly the norm, with recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce, it can be. By providing a customer-centric approach based on data, AI in ecommerce is slowly changing the game from “just a click away” approaches to more modernized shopping experiences guided by a personal stylist.
A better online shopping experience matters a great deal in a world that’s shifting toward ecommerce. In fact, U.S. ecommerce sales grew 16.0% to $453.46 billion in in 2017, while more than 6,700 brick and mortar stores closed their doors that same year.
AI Sparks Engagement Easily
Keeping customers engaged continues to be a challenge for brands. Once a customer makes a purchase, they must be innovative in how they continue interacting with their customers.
AI, by contrast, can easily urge consumers to explore new pages on brand websites—helping e-commerce stores offer more personalized content to their users by making better recommendations and filtering out unnecessary choices.
Based on data gathered such as customer style preferences, measurements, and the occasion they need the clothes for—ecommerce stores can proactively solve problems and provide an effortless purchasing process journey.
By maintaining a constant, meaningful relationship with the customer, AI can help stores increase customer engagement and sales.
AI Helps Retail Boost Cross-Sales
Another example that gets to the “AI fashion assistant” concept is the Amazon Echo Look, hands-free camera powered by Amazon’s AI assistant, Alexa.
Echo Look helps customers choose the right outfit based on voice commands, makes personalized recommendation for the clothing items and even reviews the outfit the subject is wearing by taking a picture.
With Echo Look, Amazon learns more about the customer, so it can improve its service and make recommendations of clothing pieces that the user can buy, again from Amazon.
“Complete the look” or “mix-and-match” recommendations with certain products is another great example of how ecommerce brands can use the power of AI to increase customer engagement and cross-sales.
FalconAI is a venture-capital backed startup that develops artificial intelligence algorithms.
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