With clothes sizing varying from retailer to retailer, one in four garments bought online is returned because it doesn’t fit. Luxury shirt retailer, Thomas Pink, is combatting the trend and improving conversion with help from online virtual fitting room, Fits.me.

Aside from increasing returns, ill fitting clothing also reduces the level of repeat purchases. Some 52 per cent of people have said they would be less likely to buy from a retailer again if they bought something from their e-commerce site that didn’t fit.

Those who enter the virtual fitting room online on the Thomas Pink website convert at a rate 29.6 per cent higher than those who could use the virtual fitting room, but don’t. As of January 2013, the proportion of garments at ThomasPink.com with a Fits.me Virtual Fitting Room ‘button’ was 75 per cent. The click-through rate (CTR) – shoppers who use the virtual fitting room during their visit – is almost one-in-five.

Nadine Sharara, head of e-commerce at Thomas Pink, is clear about the conversion benefits of the virtual fitting room. “For any optional button to get a click-through rate of almost 20 per cent is pretty impressive – the more so when you consider that almost half of our visitors, even first-time customers, believe they know their correct size already. The maths suggests that the CTR for those that admit they don’t know their size is actually over 40 per cent.

“And with Fits.me we can continuously experiment with new virtual fitting room button
appearances, texts and location to encourage as many as shoppers as possible to use the fitting room every time."

Sharara is also buoyed by customer feedback. “No less than 44 per cent of people who use the fitting room tell me they would not have bought at all without it. Another 13 per cent would have bought the wrong size, which would in all probability have led to returned garments. Three per cent would have bought multiple sizes, which always leads to returns; it’s part of the process for customers that shop that way.

“That’s a total of 60 per cent that benefited from the fitting room – also benefitting Thomas Pink – and only 40 per cent who would have bought anyway,” she concludes.

At the heart of Fits.me’s virtual fitting room is ‘FitBot’, a sophisticated robotic mannequin with artificial muscles able to mimic the shape and size of any body type – almost 100,000 different shapes.

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