Virtual fitting rooms offer an opportunity to converge the online and offline shopping experiences.
It’s intriguing the number of casual enquiries that I’ve answered in the last couple of months about the deployment of virtual fitting rooms in-store - not just online. It seems that plenty of people are thinking ahead and envisaging – for example – sales assistants walking the shopfloor, armed with their Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room on a tablet, ready to assist would-be shoppers.
Such sales assistants will be able to ‘pre-fit’ the prospective buyer before he/she heads for the fitting room, if indeed the shopper feels the need to do so. I can imagine this being particularly effective during the cold winter months when a trip to the fitting room means taking off umpteen layers of warm clothing before trying on anything. It makes perfect sense in any case – it is the ideal ice-breaker for a sales assistant to engage with a browser. The worst that can happen is that the shopper declines.
This isn’t reality yet, but it’s only some development work and a mindset away from where we are now. Expect to see it somewhere in 2013, but probably sooner rather than later.
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