The company announced the expansion of its AR clothing fitting feature.
In recent years, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks have not given up trying to accustom their users to a seamless one-click shopping experience, The Verge writes.
More ambitious in this direction are plans for Snapchat, which is trying to make the most of opportunities to integrate the shopping experience. This week, the company announced that it is expanding its AR clothing fitting feature and creating a Dress-up option. The technology is being extended to partner brands' and retailers' sites, and the end result is a kind of "mall of the future" on the phone for users.
Snapchat expects Dress-up to become more than just a fashion catalog or another Amazon counterpart. According to Caroline Navas, head of AR strategy and product marketing at Snap, the new feature is not just a shopping tab in the form of a product feed.
"Now there's really a key utilitarian use case that we focus on ... but there's also a huge area of fashion that has to do with self-expression, asking advice from friends and having a good time."
When users open Dress-up, they get to choose an item, "try it on" using AR lenses, take a picture in the new look and share it with friends. The service will also include content from brands, fashion tips and ideas from experts, which will change depending on the location, manner of using the platform and other factors.
Snap estimates that AR lenses have already been used by 250 million users worldwide, making more than 5 billion virtual "fittings. According to the company's own data, the service converts a significantly higher percentage of real customers than classic advertising.
The company is currently continuing to work on expanding its catalog of items available in AR. The new machine-learning-based technology for taking regular photos of items and turning them into 3D models is called Snap AR Image Processing. Users who take selfies in the application automatically become available to try on all the products from the catalog. In the future Snap will improve the technology, collect more data from customers and improve the shopping experience.
