Google announced this week that it has launched Boutiques.com: “a personalized shopping experience that lets you find and discover fashion goods, by creating your own curated boutique or through a collection of boutiques curated by taste-makers, celebrities, stylists, designers and fashion bloggers”.
Realising some time ago that there was an opportunity in the online fashion market, Google has been working to create an all together better ‘soft goods’ shopping experience for consumers.
Boutiques.com is based on that visual search technology of Like.com – the visual search shopping engine that Google acquired earlier in the year. On the site, users can filter their searches by a number of visual criteria, including pattern, silhouette and color.
Additionally, Google “partnered with taste-makers of all types“. As Google said on their blog: “We asked them not just to curate 10-50 great items they loved, but also to teach our site their style and taste. They did this by telling us what colors, patterns, brands and silhouettes they loved and they hated.
They took a visual quiz that taught the site to understand their style genre: Classic, Boho, Edgy, etc. Our machine learning algorithms use this information to enable you to shop all of the inventory in the style of that taste-maker, on top of the 50 items they’ve hand-curated.”
Now, Google wouldn’t be Google without an element of paid advertising, and Boutiques.com is no exception.
Nestled subtly at the bottom of the site is this message; “Boutiques.com charges merchants to include products on this website in most cases. More information for merchants is available here”. You can see the details on the Boutiques support page.
The good news for fashion fans is that you can start shopping Boutiques.com right now. The bad news is that at this time, Boutiques is only available in the US, and only for women’s fashion. Google does however plan to expand in the near future.
Happy shopping!
