Ernst & Young predicts bright future for sizing technology
23/09/2016
EY’s study focused on consumers in the UK and involved a detailed survey in which 1,000 online shoppers took part. Respondents’ answers showed that buyers return 2.2 of every ten garments bought over the internet and that in more than three-quarters of those cases, the reason people give for sending the product back is dissatisfaction with fit and sizing.
The report goes on to say that 66% of respondents said they dislike having to send items back. It also found that online shoppers who do go to the trouble of returning items they are unhappy with tend to be women who are younger and who are earning a higher income than the average.
A partner at EY, Helen Merriott, said on releasing the results of the study: “The majority of online clothes shoppers want convenience of delivery and returns. They want cheap and easy delivery and do not want to be penalised or charged for returning goods. That said, the same shoppers would prefer not to be bothered with the inconvenience of the returns process at all and would buy more online if they were more confident of the fit and knew that the retailer had used leading technology to improve the likelihood of this.”
Ms Merriott went on to say that within ten years EY expects that the clothing supply chain will be “integrated, lean and supported by rich digital technologies”. She added that this will require “digital support for supplier collaboration, 3D CAD patterns, analytics that model fabric behaviour, body scanning technologies and immersive online and physical store ‘try-on’ avatar experiences”. She concluded: “The technology is available today and we predict that within 10 years it will be mainstream.”
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