Problem: Online shopping is just like gambling, as we occasionally receive wrong-sized or poor-quality items. Returning a purchase isn’t so easy, because at the very least we have to deal with USPS and then wait upwards of several days for our refunds. On the other hand, offline shopping is very tiring and time consuming. The choices are limited and it’s difficult to compare prices.
Tryshop: You can order clothes online and try them on in a real fitting room. Of course, it’s completely free of charge. You can even order multiple sizes of the same items.
How: Behind the scenes, we work with brick-and-mortar stores and operate like Instacart. We collect the orders from local stores and deliver them to our fitting rooms or to your home. You can then try them on. This way, we can benefit from the best features of both online and offline shopping. In other words, all the stores in your city connected by one online shop with one fitting room. As for the fitting rooms, we can use the fitting rooms of local stores or we can open our own fitting rooms.
Demo: http://www.app.tryshop.co Built with Meteor, which I am a huge fan of. You will be automatically logged in to a demo account and can experience the checkout process. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.
About me: I am a physicist and a JS developer who had worked on a technicolor model for a few years until the Higgs boson was discovered. However, I don’t regret choosing that model instead of the Standard model because I think it was a good gamble. I’m a solo founder and planning to launch the app in May. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, or interest in the project, be sure to reach out to me. Thanks.
Some useful statistics:
67%- The conversion rate of customers who try on clothes in real fitting rooms.
69%- The percentage of people who look up products online, but then choose to buy them in a physical store.
62%- The percentage of online shoppers who were unhappy with fit.
Lots of people have trouble finding anything at all that fits well. I think mass customization may be a better solution to that issue. Let people input their measurements, then make the garment based on the measures they gave you.
I also think online stores need a great deal more basic information, such as materials that the garment is made from. When I have shopped online, trying to determine if it is, for example, 100% cotton has been challenging.
I have upvoted you, because I think this is a great problem space to tackle, but I really don't know if this is a good approach or not.