Exclusive 1st look at Amazon's new Prime Wardrobe service that lets you try before you buy
Amazon has revealed its latest online shopping innovation: ‘Prime Wardrobe’ where customers can try on clothes and accessories before making a purchase -- from the comfort of their own home.
"Good Morning America" got an exclusive first look today at Amazon's Prime Wardrobe feature, which ships shoppers parcels of clothes and accessories to try on at home without requiring a purchase first. Launched as an invite-only beta last year, today Amazon is making Prime Wardrobe available to all Prime members in the U.S.
"Prime Wardrobe is really about taking the pain points out of online shopping," Kate Dimmock, the fashion director at Amazon Fashion, told ABC News' Rebecca Jarvis.
"What we kept hearing from our customers was that they wanted to shop for fashion with us, but they wanted to try things on," Dimmock added. "They wanted to touch, they wanted to feel, but they didn't want to see a huge amount of money taken from their credit cards."
With Prime Wardrobe, customers can select at least three and up to eight items, including clothes, shoes and accessories.
When a shipment arrives, customers have seven days to decide what to keep and what to send back. Unlike traditional online retailers, however, there's zero upfront cost.
Instead, customers can pay for only what they decide to keep and send the rest back in a re-sealable box with a prepaid label that comes with the items.
Dimmock said that Amazon sees "fashion as a huge opportunity."
Americans spent more than $450 billion shopping online last year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Good Housekeeping's Style Director Lori Bergamotto told "GMA" that Amazon has "really cornered the market on innovation" in the world of online shopping.
"Nobody can compete with their delivery systems," she added. "There needs to be a shift in the way consumers are shopping for clothes, because Amazon has just come in and disrupted everything, and if you don't change the way that you're playing in the game, you're going to lose."
Many traditional retailers have also rolled out new approaches to shopping.
Ann Taylor recently launched its own clothing rental service, “Infinite Style,” and Walmart just launched its Jetblack personal shopping service customers can access via text message.
Moreover, a whole new crop of personal style services such as Stitchfix and Trunk Club are capitalizing on consumers' desire to make shopping even easier by offering curated boxes of clothes and accessories delivered straight to a shopper's door, with the option to subscribe.
"The marketplace in fashion retail is so crowded right now and so noisy," Bergamotto said. "If you want to be heard, if you want people to find your label and your clothes, you need to be bold and you need to be innovative."
