Using technology to address customer pain points when shopping for fashion online

One of the things I love most about working in Walmart Global Tech is that my colleagues and I are completely customer obsessed. We spend each and every day looking at every aspect of the customer experience and identifying ways to save customers time and money by providing tools designed to deliver accurate, fast and personalized experiences that take the work out of shopping.

That’s why I was so excited when Walmart acquired Zeekit last spring, a leading dynamic virtual fitting room platform that leverages computer vision and advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze apparel items. Zeekit’s technology addresses one of the biggest challenges in shopping for clothes online – understanding how an item will look on you by giving our customers the power to design a personalized shopping experience with Walmart.

And today, we’re launching a Beta version of the Zeekit technology, starting with the Choose My Model feature. Through this, customers will be able to select from among 50 different models to find one who best reflects their own skin tone, height and body shape to get a better sense of how a clothing item will look on them.

This unique feature is powered by Walmart Global Tech’s computer vision neural networks which analyze catalog images of garments and then create a dressed image using computer vision algorithms on a diverse set of Walmart model images. A neural network is a series of algorithms that works to recognize underlying relationships in sets of data.

Using neural networks is extremely effective in understanding the variety of clothing and how much variation there is in one piece. For example, a single shirt can come in six different colors, seven different sizes and be offered as a short sleeve or three quarters length and our systems are able to capture all of these variations. 

The Global Tech team is the engine powering Walmart’s digital transformation and is bringing innovations quickly to market for our customers. Zeekit’s Choose My Model is a prime example. It was brought to market within a few months of the Zeekit acquisition. The feature is now available to iOS users, across desktop and Android. To check it out, please visit Walmart.com. I look forward to hearing what you think! 

This article was originally published by Cheryl Ainoa on LinkedIn.