The basket value of online clothes shoppers who use a virtual fitting room while making their purchase is an average of 7% higher than shoppers who don’t, more than offsetting the general 1% decrease in average basket values experienced by UK clothing e-tailers over the last year.
The data comes from virtual fitting room solutions provider Fits.me, which plotted and analysed the uplift in average basket values for all its clients. Different retailers experience different levels of uplift, with no statistical correlation between uplift and market sector such as luxury, mid-range or high-street.
The average basket value for the clothing, footwear and accessories sector as a whole has declined by 1% over the last 12 months. Womenswear has seen an increase in average basket value of 2%, but menswear has seen average basket values decline by 10%, the largest fall in any online retail category as monitored by industry group IMRG.
Heikki Haldre, Fits.me’s founder and VP Business Development, said, “Not only do virtual fitting rooms increase conversion rates, they increase the average value of each conversion – impressive and valuable against a backdrop of increasing conversion rates but declining basket values. Throw in reduced returns because shoppers buy more accurately and the business results are demonstrably, measurably clear. And all this comes from improving the customer experience.
“So what seems to be happening is a combination of several things. The additional fit confidence they get from using the virtual fitting room effectively causes a proportion of shoppers to upsell themselves to more expensive garments. Others simply add one or more extra garments to their basket, perhaps since they’re confident of the fit. And other customers, perhaps even shoppers who might have been shopping for something other than clothes, find themselves buying a garment because of the virtual fitting room,” he explained.
Currently, most virtual fitting rooms and fitting room usage comes directly from garment product pages. Cross-recommendation functionality, in which garments are proactively recommended in conjunction with each other or with other products from pages other than the basic product page, will provide opportunities to boost average order values still further.
