Amazon Will Now Let You Try On Clothes Before You Buy Them (theverge.com)

For many people, buying clothing online is not worth the hassle of getting a pair of pants or a shirt that does not fit. Many retailers have sought to eliminate that risk by offering free returns on clothing, but now Amazon is going even further. From a report: Amazon is launching Prime Wardrobe, a new program that will let you try on clothes before you buy them. Once you select at least three Prime Wardrobe-eligible pieces from over a million clothing options, Amazon will ship your selections to you in a resealable return box with a prepaid shipping label. After you try on the clothes, you can put the ones you don't want back in the box and leave it at your front door -- Prime Wardrobe also comes with free scheduled pickups from UPS. If you decide to keep at least three items you will get a 10 percent discount off your purchase, and if you keep five or more pieces the discount rises to 20 percent.

Comments

Oh great

[ChoGGi]

used clothes from Amazon, just what I wanted.

Re:Oh great

[MikeDataLink]

used clothes from Amazon, just what I wanted.

How do you know the pair you tried on a Target or JCP wasn't tried on 5 minutes before you? What's the difference between that and this other than location?

Re:Oh great

[Gilgaron]

You can hang out and watch the staff at the retail places fold or rehang the clothes from the dressing room and put them back on the rack if you like... they don't launder them first.

Re:Oh great

[Khashishi]

There's a huge difference between clothes that have been tried in the fitting room for a couple minutes and clothes that have been "tried" for a night on the town and then returned. Most people aren't gonna be mucking around too much in the clothes in a retail shop, but who knows what you will do to them at home or elsewhere.

Re:Oh great

[contrains]

The difference there though would be that those clothes still never leave the store, whereas these may have been in any type of home environment before being returned. This says nothing of retail returns, however.

Re: Oh great

[PoopJuggler]

And herpes.

Too bad sizing isn't standarized.

[jellomizer]

The big problem is the lack of standardization in clothing sizes.
Depending on the brand a Medium Sized shirt on me can fit nicely or it could be Tight and I will need to go to a large version, when then becomes baggy on me. Other brands have finer detail on the sizing, but the size number is only relevant to the brand.
Then you have the problem with different body types. As a stockier build, many things that fit are either too long, or just tight around the arms and shoulder other than that they may fit.

Except for having free return shipping. Amazon should ship over a Tailor to get your size.

Re:Too bad sizing isn't standarized.

[swillden]

Amazon should ship over a Tailor to get your size.

You jest, but you really should be able to take detailed measurements of yourself (not hard; but it helps to have a friend) and enter them into the web site, and then Amazon should be able to calculate how each piece of clothing will fit you and show you an image of a virtual dummy shaped like you with the clothes on it. This would not be easy, and would probably require both some serious research modeling how various fabrics fall on different shapes, and some method of acquiring very detailed data on the construction of each piece of clothing, including variation within sizes.

Couple this with something like Google's project Tango and maybe there's a future in which you strip down, point your phone camera at yourself and have your phone generate a detailed 3D model of your body, then send that model to an online clothing retailer, which can show you exactly how something will fit. Actually the logical next step is to get rid of rack sizing entirely and have each piece of clothing custom-created (by robots) to exactly your measurements.

Super easy returns are clearly just a stopgap towards the eventual perfect fitting.

Great

[A. B3ttik]

This will be great for my wife. Not so great for my wallet.

"But it's 20% off! I'm saving us money by buying more!"

Re:Great

[zodar]

Here's how the rest of that conversation goes in my house:

"I know how you can save 100% off."

"I know, I know, don't buy it, God!"

"You do? Because it seems like you DON'T know."

21st Century Capitalism.

[geekmux]

Prime Video. Prime Pantry. Prime Wardrobe.

Sure as hell seems like every new feature on Amazon is making a Prime membership rather mandatory instead of merely a nice benefit to cut down on shipping costs.

I shouldn't be surprised. Being forced to subscribe to every service you use to create a per-customer-cost-for-life revenue stream is the definition of capitalism in the 21st century.

Re:21st Century Capitalism.

[squiggleslash]

Being forced to subscribe to every service you use to create a per-customer-cost-for-life revenue stream is the definition of capitalism in the 21st century.

I wouldn't say you're forced to do anything. You still have the same options you did before Amazon launched this service.

A membership fee means a guaranteed source of revenue, in turn making it easier to try out new ideas and products knowing that there's a financial buffer mitigating some of the risk associated with it, so you'd expect services like this to be tied to Prime.

Vanity Sizing - now in men's clothes

[jbridges]

Used to be Vanity Sizing only messed up the woman's clothing market. But now it's infected men's clothing as well.
Phrases like "relaxed fit" are only the first clue. There are now all kinds of tricks to telling what the actual size will be. If you see any kind of adjustments or elastic you can be sure they will be super oversized to make men feel better about their growing girth.

All this makes it brutally hard to buy clothes that fit based on measurements!

The sad part is, I don't think we can turn back. Consumers love the idea of wearing a smaller size than their real measurement, so like the marching morons with their speedometers that lie, we keep buying the vanity sizing.

Re:Vanity Sizing - now in men's clothes

[Anonymous Coward]

All this makes it brutally hard to buy clothes that fit based on measurements!

I make clothes from scratch, starting with pattern drafting. Buying clothes based on measurements will always be a crap-shoot. There are countless curves and angles that can not be communicated effectively. Most "size charts" are laughably simplistic. They might tell you if a garment will be too small to stretch over your body, but if you actually care about how your clothes fit, you have to try things on.

Re:Vanity Sizing - now in men's clothes

[swillden]

All this makes it brutally hard to buy clothes that fit based on measurements!

Soon enough we'll get rid of rack sizing entirely and you'll just provide your detailed body measurements (like a tailor would take, but measured with your smartphone) and the clothing will be custom made to fit. I give it 10 years at the outside.

That's nice... what about furniture?

[mark-t]

Seriously... online business is decimating brick and mortar stores but there is absolutely no way I would ever buy something like a sofa without trying it out first.

Re:RIP Credit Card

[slashdice]

I'm waiting for Amazon Girlfriend. They send you 3 girlfriends and you can try them out for a week and return the ones you don't like.

Luckily for the rest of us...

[SuperKendall]

Fart in the pants and send them back.

That would concern me more, except that neither I nor anyone else I know need XXXXXXL pants.

Re:This is BETTER for your wallet

[Grishnakh]

You need to get a wife/girlfriend who has her own money and buys her own clothes.

Re:Killing the environment

[LunaticTippy]

I used to feel this way too, but it might be misguided. Imagine a hundred people all driving to the mall to try on clothes - that is 100 cars making 200 round trips, plus all the electricity wasted at the mall on HVAC, lighting, as well as all the items that don't get bought and the army of trucks to supply the mall with products.

Those 100 people could all be served by a single UPS truck making one big trip. The whole thing might be greener than the old way, even with all the wasted boxes and returns and whatnot. It is certainly cheaper, which keeps a hard lid on resource use.

Re:How does this make business sense?

[JaredOfEuropa]

Some European fashion retailers have been doing this for a good while, and still manage to turn a profit. In fact free returns and only paying for the items you keep is starting to become the norm here.

I am sure that this practice of taking a lot of returns, and having to receive and repackage them, eats into the profits of retailers a bit, but they make it up in volume: hassle and cost of returns has been one of the biggest problems that consumers had when mail ordering apparel. Assume those costs and you'll sell more, which means you will have more clout when negotiating with fashion labels, which is extremely important. A boutique owner once told me that selling clothes is the easy part, almost anyone can do that. The hard part is to make a decent profit, and you do that when buying your stock. Which involves some tough negotiating.