Google Aims to Revolutionize Online Fashion Shopping with Boutiques.com
By: Arthur Cooper
Submitted: 2010-11-22 13:09:47 | Word Count: 664
A squeal rang out from fashionistas across the country as Google announced a new way to shop for clothes online: Boutiques.com. The site opened for business on Wednesday.
By partnering with trend setters like celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers they set up the site with various boutiques, so shoppers could easily access their favorite styles. But, they’ve also made it so you can create your own boutique as well. Select from hundreds of thousands of retailers worldwide to mix and match trends and make a boutique that’s uniquely you. Boutiques.com will even make suggestions of things you may like, things that go well together, and more. It’s sort of like Pandora Radio for the fashion world. Once you’ve created your store front, you can even “love” or “hate” certain items to help the site better learn what you like, just like giving a song thumbs up or down on Pandora. This level of customization allows you to construct outfits from thousands of retailers worldwide to bring you just the look you want.
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As Boutiques.com is a Google product, it allows users to search an item and get entire outfit ideas based on that item. For example, typing in “red sandals” will produce a range of outfits based on that one item.
Here’s a breakdown of the new site’s features:
Advanced Search Filters: Filter your searches by color, size, silhouette, fabric patterns and more.
Inspiration Photos: This is what I was talking about earlier. You can type in an item like “red blouse” and on the right side of the page will be an entire column of outfit ideas. However, when I tried it, it didn’t work on everything. Perhaps I was being too specific, but terms like “alligator purse” and “Birkenstock sandals” came up with quite a few products, but no outfit inspirations. Maybe the site is trying to tell me something about my fashion sense. Who knows.
Visual Search: I assume this refers to when you hover over an image in your store it pops up with similar looking items. It’s useful if you like the style of that item, but not the color. However, if you’ve created your store correctly, it shouldn’t come up with any colors you hate, but sometimes that bright orange number just slips though.
One thing I think the site is currently lacking is a price filter. When I created my store front it spit out everything from a $40 dress to a $1,700 dress. There’s also no way to filter your store by size. For those of us that aren’t the “normal” supermodel size, I think a few more options are necessary here.
Currently the site is only available to women in the United States, but Boutiques.com hopes to expand their site worldwide, to men and possibly kids in the future.
At any rate, Boutiques.com will certainly give retailers a run for their money as shoppers gear up for the holidays and Google continues to create new ways to give them what they want.
