Asian online clothes shoppers more picky than Western ones

WESTERN shoppers are more ready to purchase clothes while browsing online compared with Asian shoppers, according to Asian e-commerce giant Zalora. Its regional managing director, Michele Ferrario, told BizIT that buyers in Asia tend to spend a lot more time considering their purchases, and that conversion rates aren't as high as those of Western sites such as UK e-tailer Asos.com.

To that end, Zalora just launched a new "virtual fitting room" feature, which it hopes will increase the level of confidence for shoppers, and in turn the amount they spend on the site. The feature, created by Swedish technology company Virtusize, displays the exact measurements of an item, and allows users to overlay a silhouette of a piece over another, so they can get an idea of how the item will fit based on size and cut. Users can save items that they've bought in the past and compare other products against those.

Zalora's reason for implementing the Virtusize feature is markedly different from Western counterparts, agreed Virtusize's Asia-Pacific manager, Andreas Olausson.