Amazon have a useful feature to enhance the buying experience for shoppers. They are using real customer feedback from previous customers who have purchased a garment to give clothing size guidance to other potential shoppers.
I really like this feature and I’m guess so do other shoppers. When buying clothing there can be enormous variations in fit between one brand and another. That’s not so bad on the high street when you probably know the sizing that fits you from your favourite retailers. It’s different online when you may be purchasing unknown brands and often goods manufactured in different countries where sizing expectations are different – for example goods manufactured for Chinese consumers will always come up small in European standards.
Amazon offers feedback from customers using five measures, for example in the case of this jacket they are able to state that 57% of customers say this garment runs small. The options are:
- Too small
- Moderately small
- Fits as expected
- Moderately large
- Too large
Naturally I had to test how well real customer feedback is and normally for a jacket like this I’d opt for XL, but knowing that previous customers say the garment runs small I selected the XXL size. The clothing size guidance from real customers worked a treat and the jacket fits – if you want to see it I’ll be wearing it to ChannelAdvisor Catalyst on Wednesday this week (if the current heat wave doesn’t continue!)
It’s probably not trivial to add such a feature to your own website and it does rely on selling at scale and having repeatable inventory so is likely something that only the largest retailers would want to consider. It is something that would be good to see on other marketplaces however, seeing a garment runs small right up front before you even select a size is hyper useful for the consumer and is also likely to have the effect of reducing returns.
