Amazon Fashion and social media platform Snapchat have announced a new partnership to deliver augmented reality shopping to Snapchat users. The new initiative, dubbed Virtual Try-On, will initially start with eyewear from the Amazon Fashion Try-On catalogue.
The new service will let Snapchatters browse the vast catalogue of thousands of Amazon Fashion’s eyewear products and use their phone’s camera to ‘try them on’ digitally before making a purchase decision. The Snapchat community can use the app to explore, shop and digitally audition the eyewear directly on Snapchat, and then buy the selected pair at the Amazon Fashion store.
The benefit for Snapchat is access to an instant catalogue of an enormous range of augmented reality (AR) products – eyewear is the first category, but more will follow. For Amazon Fashion, this is a huge population of 363 million daily active users who can take advantage of instant buying via mobile shopping.
Amazon has steadily been rolling out its AR shopping offerings, starting early on with Try-on Socks and Try-on Shoes for iOS. The company actually started its AR service in 2017, using Apple’s ARKit to allow for virtual auditioning of products in a household. Since then, it has been introducing more opportunities to sample products using your phone camera to encourage mobile sales.
Amazon As Pioneer
Amazon is not the only company exploring the future of AR shopping. IKEA was an early adopter of the technology, and the beauty industry is also flirting with the technology. Yves St Laurent is currently selling an AR beauty product which lets customers experiment and create different lipstick shades using a home device and some clever software.
Snap has also been heavily involved with AR shopping for several years, piggybacking on the commitment from Apple to make its phones AR-capable. Its introduction last year of Snap Spectacles was a direct effort to encourage more creative AR applications. The roll out was only to a select group of creators though, so the fruits of that effort have yet to produce a huge result.
While the early promise of AR glasses has so far failed to materialize (remember Google Glass?), shopping seems to be progressing towards some sort of useful future. The fact that Android is still lagging behind is not helping, but hopefully that will change over time as the technology matures.
For now, the Amazon and Snap collaboration seems to point to the future of the genre. Users in the US and Canada can access the new service from the Amazon Fashion portal, or the Snapchat Camera Lens Carousel. Amazon also has the ability to keep products updated in real time, so if a product goes out of stock, it can be replaced with an equivalent instantly.
Users will be able to test out products from major brands, including Maui Jim, Oakley, Costa Del Mar and Persol. Other brands and additional categories of fashion and apparel will continue to be added to the service over the coming months.
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