ASOS launches digital assistant to help customers find right size

ASOS has developed an artificially intelligent (AI) system to help customers find the right size of garment for them while shopping online.

The sizing tool, dubbed Fit Assistant, will use machine learning to offer consumers personalised size recommendations for particular products based on previous purchases and returns.

The retailer has launched this capability globally as an in-app tool, and will be able to give customers a more accurate idea of how clothing will fit based on previous data, or based on the customer’s height, weight and fit preference.

Andy Berks, digital product director at ASOS, said the retailer stocks so many different brands of clothing – between 800 and 900 in total – that it can be difficult for a customer to know what size they are in each of these brands.

“We want to do all we can to make sure our customers are getting the right size, first time,” he said. “This is where ASOS Fit Assistant comes in – we can now offer personalised size recommendations across ASOS collections, exclusive labels and fashion favourites. Ultimately, we’re here to make our customer’s lives easier, giving them the confidence to shop with us and minimising the risk of disappointment when their ASOS parcel arrives.”

Customers are becoming more fickle as a result of the choice of retailers available through digital shopping, but although they are less likely to be loyal, they are also being driven by features of particular retailers such as personalisation, customer service, social presence and speed of delivery.

This fickle consumer behaviour is especially typical of the ASOS target market, who are fashion-conscious digital shoppers in their 20s.

Berks said the brand uses technology to solve customer problems and make its service better, thus catering to increasingly digitally driven consumers.

A trend for “discovery” is becoming more common in digital shopping as the consumer is often bombarded with choice, therefore needing help to find the products best suited to them – something ASOS uses machine learning to provide to around 15 million customers that browse its site.

In the past few years, ASOS has launched a number of recommendation services focused on using machine learning and AI to improve the customer experience, including personalisation features such as Your Edit, which shows products it thinks a customer might like; Style Match, which shows customers products similar to those already bought or looked at; and curated carousel ‘You might also like’.

The firm also recently launched voice shopping capabilities through Google Assistant, allowing customers to use voice commands to browse the brand’s AI shopping guide Enki, originally created as a Facebook-based fashion chatbot.

As a pureplay online retailer, ASOS has always been digital-first, and considers itself a technology company as much as it does a retailer, using tech from firms such as Oracle to support its use of data for AI and machine learning capabilities.

A focus on finding the right fit for online retailers is not only on ASOS’s mind, with businesses such as Metail focused on creating this capability to allow other websites to help consumers find clothes that will fit them, thereby reducing returns.