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Shopping online for clothes? We know you’re crossing your fingers that you won’t have to send those jeans back, but the reality is that a quarter of online apparel purchases are returned. That's $38 billion merchants have to refund every year, plus $25 billion in processing costs, according to recent data from Coresight Research. Not to mention the headache for you when the jeans don’t fit.
Today, Google introduced a new shopping feature to close at least one of the gaps—virtual try-on for women’s tops, powered by AI. Shoppers can use the tool to see how an item looks on a range of models with different skin tones, body shapes, ethnicities, and even hairstyles.
Google is working with brands including Anthropologie, Everlane, H&M, and Loft. Starting with an image of a product, its generative AI model shows how it will drape, fold, cling, and stretch on 80 models ranging from size XXS to 4XL. The goal is to represent a wide range of body types in the shopping process and cut down on the number of dissatisfied customers, and ultimately returns.
“We feel that [consumers] are going to have much more confidence in virtually trying on and buying these products,” Lilian Rincon, Google’s senior director of product management, told Retail Brew. “And also, this is meaningful for merchants as well, because hopefully this will help with conversion rates.”
Apparel is one of Google’s most-searched shopping categories, Rincon said, but shoppers don’t always get what they want: 59% of online shoppers are unsatisfied with an item they shopped for because it didn’t look how they expected, and 42% say they don’t feel represented by images of models they see in product listings, according to Google survey data.
Google is launching the new virtual try-on technology using its Shopping Graph—a data set of 35+ billion product listings. The company plans to introduce virtual try-on for men’s tops later this year.
“We want to bring cutting-edge technologies to bear against real-world consumer problems for consumers and merchants,” Maria Renz, VP and GM of commerce at Google, told Retail Brew. “We’re very confident that this technology will lower returns. We’re pretty confident that that should help lower the cost for merchants in the end.” And with any luck, you won’t have to return those jeans.