Amazon Prime Wants to Be Your New Personal Shopper
Amazon's the place you can get your winter coat, your Haus Laboratories fix, and your seasonal accessories—and anything you want to buy multiples of without blowing your budget—in a single cart. (Apparently, it's also where Bella Hadid gets her colorful pants.) But navigating its seemingly infinite selection of products can be a huge undertaking, no matter how strategic you are at keywords. Amazon Fashion knows this and is hoping to make it a lot easier—and less time-consuming—for Prime members to find the absolute best pieces on the site.
Last summer Amazon introduced Prime Wardrobe. The try-before-you-buy feature allows Prime members to have up to eight items of their choosing sent to them for a week to test out, then they can return what they don't like. (They're charged only for what they keep.) Now the company is announcing an additional service that operates more like a subscription box: Called Personal Shopper, it's essentially a stylist that makes recommendations of brands and products you might like based on a survey that lets you detail your preferred aesthetic and fit, curating your box accordingly. It's available exclusively on the Amazon app and will cost Prime members $4.99 a month.
"Personal Shopper is providing curated help for customers to shop the catalog, to get style advice, to have someone who's their stylish best friend shop on their behalf and give them highly personalized recommendations across their preferences," Tony Bacos, Amazon Fashion's chief technology officer, tells Glamour. "With Prime Wardrobe, customers are building their own experiences. Personal Shopper is taking that convenience to the next level."
Instead of you picking out your own pieces, Personal Shopper does that legwork: It'll recommend items it thinks you'll like, from which you select up to eight to be sent to you. You get a week to test-drive them, and then you can return what you don't love. (Returns are free.)
Beyond the initial style survey, Bacos explains that there are a few ways you help inform Personal Shopper of what you'd like to see in your box. A few days after you join, you'll receive an initial selection of products that you get to weigh in on: You identify what you want sent to you, what you don't, and why. Once that's done, your first shipment goes out.
"The more the customers are willing to share about their preferences, the better we're able to do on their behalf," Bacos says. It's kind of like, well, having a personal shopper: By giving feedback about what's working and what isn't over time, the experience and recommendations become more refined.
In the year since introducing it, Bacos says they've had "over a million customers of all shapes, sizes, and motivations" use Prime Wardrobe. Still, they've noticed a few recurring behaviors; for example, it's become a tool for discovery for some shoppers. "Anytime you're buying a brand, there's a sort of nervousness around fit and quality—Wardrobe lowers that risk. We also see customers putting the same item in two different sizes in a box, if they aren't certain of what size to order." With Personal Shopper, Amazon hoping to build on that and offer some guidance in navigating their product selection.
At launch, Personal Shopper is available only on women's styles; the service for men's fashion is expected to be rolled out in the near future.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
