Tech

From apparel to home, and now shoes, Amazon is accelerating its push into virtual tech

The e-comm giant recently rolled out a virtual try-on tool for shoes.
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Amazon

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Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

Augmented reality has gained traction over the past few years, alongside online shopping. And Amazon, which has been stepping into the tech, recently debuted its latest virtual try-on feature—for shoes.

  • Available on the company’s iOS app (in the US and Canada), shoppers can point their phone’s camera at their feet to see how the shoe fits. See, the feature doesn’t yet tell users if the shoe fits…we’ll come back to that.

But first, let’s see how Amazon has dabbled in virtual try-on over the years:

  • In 2017, it introduced an AR view to its app for the first time, which allows shoppers to see how items from chairs to tables and more would appear in their spaces.
  • The e-comm giant would follow this up in 2020 with what it called “Room Decorator,” further focusing its AR experiments on the home.
  • That same year, Amazon unveiled Made for You, a custom-clothing service that uses VR to let shoppers see the final product (before they see it IRL). This April, the company added athletic tees to the mix.

A shoe-in? To really elevate its footwear feature, John Harmon, senior analyst at Coresight Research, told Retail Brew that Amazon needs to introduce an actual fit check. “The thing about footwear, my opinion is that the fit is kind of binary: It fits or it doesn’t,” he said.—JS

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

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