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Online personal shopping overview
Hello, and thank you for using Wonder for your question about the online personal shopping industry.
In short, trends are undoubtedly pointing towards AI and machine assisted personal shopping and style advice, with "curated shopping" essentially penetrating — or transforming — the online personal shopping industry.
NOTES:
#1 Our review primarily focuses on personal shopping in fashion, as this is the traditional context of the phrase, but we will include a small nod to the global trend of personal shopping assistance in all areas of e-commerce.
#2 Some of the referenced articles and statistics are older than 2 years, this is because more recent reports were behind paywalls, or an article was found to be the most relevant/recent in a certain topic. However, newer articles prove trends from older articles have not seized, but further embedded themselves in the industry.
Please find a deep dive of our findings below.
Personal shopping nowadays
In general, the primary reason for using a personal shopping service is the same across offline and online avenues: the need for personalized fashion advice. The secondary reason is usually a lack of time to go through the entire shopping process.
For example, according to a market survey by Mintel from 2014 (referenced in this article), 18% of women between ages 18-34 said they ask advice from others when shopping for clothes. 12% of women between ages 18-24 would like the help of a personal shopper.
Personal shopping isn't restricted to women only. Men are involved as well, as noted by "how to spend it" writer Mark C O'Flaherty in his article on the history of men's personal shopping services.
This fact is referenced in the aforementioned Mintel survey, where 18% of men aged 25-34 also would like extra styling advice when shopping for clothes.
While personal shopping has been a luxury for many years, it has become a free perk at many retail stores.
Online personal shopping
As e-commerce became more and more mainstream, several online services popped up to combine online shopping and a personal shopping experience.
Clients input their information (measurements, styles, maybe a few images of what they are looking for), answer a few questions, maybe they are asked to select from a collection of images and styles to streamline their search, and then receive a bundle of clothes — on the website, or sometimes delivered to their house, like with Trunkclub — then decide what to buy, and what to reject/send back.
In more and more cases, this curation process is either fully, or partially assisted by computer algorithms. An extreme and experimental example of this approach is The North Face's implementation of IBM's Watson AI to try to create a personalized AI shopping experience.
This trend, combined with the ever deepening penetration of e-commerce in general, is sure to push brands towards an even larger reliance on algorithms in creating a personalized shopping experience.
Predictions by Zenith Media envision personal shopping assistance as a great way to counter the dehumanized nature of the huge online marketplaces that provide personalized selections but lack any personal interaction. This model could be expanded into all areas of e-commerce, not just fashion.
Online personal shopping consumers
Unfortunately, after looking through industry articles and reports, we were unable to find any specific consumer profiles and relevant statistics for online personal shopping. Either no publicly available collection of such data exists, or it's located in a survey/report that is behind a paywall.
That being said, it is fairly easy to speculate about the average consumers of personal shopping assistance through the many articles about the topic (articles: 1 , 2 , 3):
Men and women, between ages 18-45, who either have no time to spend on shopping because of their busy schedule, or who want personalized fashion advice.
The online component adds the comfort of not even leaving your home, which is great for people who don't have time to go and check the curated clothing themselves, like working moms.
Conclusions
To sum it all up, it seems machine-assisted, personalized shopping experiences are influencing the way personal shoppers and their clients connect with each other.
While the one-on-one aspect of in-store personal shopping will never lose its relevance, and luxury personal shopping isn't going away either, online solutions provide a cheap and quick alternative to the offline experience, retaining some level of personal contact, and adding the comfort of doing all of it from home.
Most of the people using these online services are probably women between ages 18-45, who have no time to go shopping, or want personalized fashion advice without going to a store.
The same analysis can be said about men, though they traditionally make up a smaller portion of the personal shopping clientele.
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