AI-Enhanced Shopping: A Virtual Dressing Room Experience

One of the purest joys of shopping is that moment when you step out of the dressing room, wearing an outfit that feels like it was made just for you. The feeling is often the result of trying on different styles, sizes, and colors until you discover that perfect fit. This hands-on, personal approach is something we often miss while shopping online. Well, not anymore!

Google is to unveil two game-changing features that bring the fitting room experience to your screen: Virtual try-on for apparel, an innovation powered by generative AI, and new filters to narrow down your search.

Bringing Online Shopping to Life

The challenge of online clothes shopping is well-known. The majority of online shoppers agree: it's tough to predict how clothes will fit and look on you based solely on model images. A significant percentage of online shoppers express disappointment when their online purchases don't meet their visual expectations.

To combat this, Google has launched a new virtual try-on tool. This tool allows you to visualize how a piece of clothing will look on you before buying it. Google's innovative generative AI model generates a lifelike image of how the chosen clothing item would look on various models, factoring in aspects like drape, folds, cling, and wrinkles and shadows. Google's model portfolio represents a wide range of sizes, skin tones (guided by the Monk Skin Tone Scale), body shapes, ethnicities, and hair types.

Starting today, U.S. shoppers can virtually try on women's tops from a range of brands, including Anthropologie, Everlane, H&M, and LOFT. Look for products with the "Try On" badge and select the model that best represents you. As Google continues to enhance this technology in conjunction with its Shopping Graph, you can expect this feature to expand to more brands and items.

Five Transformative Impacts of AI on Online Shopping Experience

1. Improved User Experience: The virtual try-on feature enables customers to have a more interactive and personalized shopping experience, getting a better sense of how clothes might fit and look on their own bodies. This could potentially increase customer satisfaction and confidence in their purchases.
2. Increased Conversion Rates: With a better understanding of how items would look on them, customers may be more likely to finalize their purchases, reducing cart abandonment rates. This could result in increased conversion rates and higher revenues for online retailers.
3. Reduced Returns: US consumers were estimated to return more than 20% of all online purchases in 2022. In 2020, returned inventory created an estimated 5.8 billion pounds of landfill waste. With more accurate representations provided by the virtual try-on feature, the frequency of such returns could be substantially reduced.
4. Inclusive Shopping: 42% of online shoppers don’t feel represented by the images of models they see in e-commerce. The feature represents a wide range of sizes, skin tones, body shapes, ethnicities, and hair types, making online shopping more inclusive and allowing a wider range of customers to visualize how clothes would look on them.
5. Enhanced Search and Recommendation Capabilities: With guided refinements, customers can narrow down their search based on color, style, and pattern across various online stores, providing a more efficient and enjoyable shopping experience. This could also lead to better recommendations, increasing cross-selling and up-selling opportunities for businesses. In summary, these AI-enhanced features aim to replicate the physical shopping experience online, adding personalization, inclusivity, and efficiency to the process. As technology advances, the online shopping experience will likely continue to evolve and improve.