Automation in Fashion Industry

By Atul Rai, Co-Founder & CEO, Staqu

Fashion e-commerce has, since long being the muse for technocrats across the globe. The fashion e-tailing market has been a boom in India, especially in the past years, market with massive investments, mergers, acquisitions and consolidations happening in the circuit. In fact, as per the industry pundits, the fashion e-tailing market in India is expected to grab a whopping 35% of the spending in an online transaction by 2020, surpassing the consumer electronics market.

Atul Rai
Co-Founder & CEO, Staqu

When such a fertile market potential meets the current wave of entrepreneurial innovation spreading in the country, fireworks are bound to happen. Hence, we have several players fiddling with machine intelligence to develop technology addressing the pain points suffered by the fashion e-commerce industry. Here’s discussing the innovation technology is bringing onboard, ready to revolutionize the face of fashion e-commerce.

1. The search goes visual – making pictures speak a thousand words!

Since long, users have been enduring the daunting task of having to describe the shirt or the dress they want in words. It is humanly impossible to describe the texture, fabric, patterns and length of the garment in words. Besides, the same comes with language barriers as well; with e-commerce industry looking to strengthen its roots in the tier II and III cities and towns and rural industry, the language barrier may amount to a bigger loss of opportunity.

However, there are tech startups today, striving to address the same challenge, hence the automating search. These startups are helping e-commerce companies make it possible for their users to explore products online, by simply uploading the images of the products they are looking for. The technology can come to your rescue if, for instance, you stumble upon a shirt on Instagram or Pinterest and would want to own the similar one.

2. Shop for the entire look

Taking visual search a notch higher, there are technologies existing today that enable users to take home the entire look. Since fashion and e-commerce go beyond just the clothes, including accessories and shoes etc, this functionality is able to provide users with the complete package. Fashion search today has become so innovative, following the disruption in the space that simply by uploading an image of their favorite celebrity adoring a particular style, users will now be able to shop for the entire look.

3. Automating Image Description & Meta Tags

The visual search primarily works by reading the images, identifying its features like shape, color, size and proportions. This is a breakthrough when viewed against the keyword based search, which is subjective and dependent on the person’s linguistic ability to describe an image.

By playing around with different elements of Artificial Intelligence, especially deep learning and NLP, tech startups today are able to automate image descriptions and generate Meta tags which are appropriate, best suiting the image. While tagging images manually has become a time-consuming and capital-intensive affair, the technologies developed via artificial intelligence are able to render the same within seconds.

4. Contextual and Personalized Product Recommendations

Product recommendation based on visually similar searched items yield better, more personalized and contextual results. Oftentimes, the searched product might be out stock, or the shopper might be looking for a similar product, but with certain changes. By applying deep learning and artificial intelligence in the recommendations section, technology is rescuing the fashion e-commerce portals, giving users exactly what they are looking for.

These technologies navigate the database and return with similar products, for instance, in the same color, shape, pattern and style. In addition to reducing shopping cart abandonment, this technology is pivotal in providing users with a gratifying online shopping experience. The experience can be further intensified, by associating the visual search and recommendation technology with geo-location and weather conditions persisting over the period.

5. Intelligent prediction and forecasts

By analyzing the past behavior of users on the sites, fashion e-commerce sites powered by the technology of today, are able to predict the buying behavior of users, with utmost precision. By being able to analyze the upcoming trends as well, the e-commerce sites would be in a better capacity to provide the best user experience, providing online shoppers exactly with what they are looking for.

With fashion e-commerce industry opening gates to the innovation, led by artificial intelligence, it is safe for the online shoppers to expect the onset of interesting times. By making it easier for the users to discover products they are looking for, technology is surely set to increase the bottom-line and conversion rates, while plummeting shopping cart abandonment and buyer’s remorse.