The Secondhand Fashion Marketplace Challenges: Catalog Management & Product Discovery
The secondhand, or often often known as ‘pre-loved’ fashion marketplace has emerged as a big player in the style industry, revolutionizing the way in which people buy and sell clothing. This form of marketplace offers a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to traditional fashion retail. Like any growing industry, the secondhand fashion marketplace encounters its own distinct challenges.
In this post, we concentrate on a critical challenge faced by the secondhand fashion marketplace: effective catalog management and product discovery. With an intensive array of fashion products which can be frequently updated, the flexibility to facilitate seamless product searches and maintain an organized, visually enticing catalog becomes crucial.
Before we dive into the style RE-commerce challenges, it’s essential to research why the secondhand fashion market is booming.
Zara, H&M, and Zalando are embracing the style secondhand trend
Fashion, with its constant renewal, has all the time drawn inspiration from the past. Currently, the vintage trend holds a distinguished position within the industry. Why? The global fashion landscape has witnessed a big shift towards sustainability following the Covid-19 pandemic. This trend has presented a business opportunity in the shape of Fashion REcommerce.
The second-hand, vintage and resale market within the Fashion Industry is experiencing rapid growth. In 2022, the market value of secondhand and resale apparel worldwide was estimated at a staggering $177 billion. This value is projected to double in size by 2027, reaching $351 billion.
The momentum of the style secondhand market can largely be attributed to Gen Z. A considerable 62% of Gen Z and Millennial shoppers express a preference for looking for secondhand items before considering recent purchases.
The numbers clearly indicate the importance of the secondhand, vintage, and resale market. This leading major fashion players like Zara, H&M and Zalando to strategically put money into this flourishing sector.
Challenges for Secondhand Fashion Marketplaces and How AI can solve them!
All trends are a challenge in themselves. However after we mix fashion with secondhand and makerplace, the challenges multiply.
In secondhand or pre-loved fashion marketplaces, establishing trust is an important aspect that directly impacts the success and growth of the platform. The nature of shopping for and selling pre-owned items can often give rise to skepticism and distrust amongst users. However, one effective solution to deal with this pain is the mixing of reviews.
Once the challenge of constructing trust in a secondhand fashion marketplace has been overcome, two fundamental challenges emerge that require attention: efficient catalog management and improving product discovery.
- Product Catalog Management Challenges: Efficient catalog management is crucial on account of the character of secondhand marketplaces, which generally feature numerous always changing products. Maintaining an organized and up-to-date catalog becomes essential to facilitate user navigation and search. This involves establishing a transparent and coherent structure of categories and subcategories, in addition to implementing tags and filters that enable buyers to simply find the specified products. Additionally, an agile system is required so as to add, update, and take away products as they’re sold and recent items are added. Efficient catalog management ensures a seamless user experience and enhances the satisfaction of buyers and sellers within the marketplace.
- Product Discovery Challenges: Improving product discovery is one other significant challenge in secondhand marketplaces. With a big selection of products available, it’s crucial for buyers to quickly find items that meet their needs and preferences.
To address this challenge, it is prime that the catalog is efficiently managed. Search engines, filtering systems, and/or product advice solutions are undoubtedly helpful in improving product discovery. However, for them to be effective and display relevant results, proper product catalog management is required beforehand.
In conclusion, with a transparent organization of the catalog and an efficient search system, users can navigate and simply find the specified products. But how can this be made possible if the catalog is always being updated? AI Solutions for Fashion!
Visual AI-Powered Product Tagging is the most effective technique to optimize product catalog management and boost product discovery on Secondhand Fashion Marketplaces
With Secondhand Fashion Marketplaces, corporations operate with a non-traditional inventory model, which presents big challenges in standardizing product tags and descriptions. When keywords, descriptors, and tags are lacking or not standardized, marketplaces struggle to categorize products, optimize product recommendations, and improve search results. This significantly affects product discovery and the general customer experience.
However, by utilizing AI-powered product solutions like Wide Eyes’ Autotagging, all of those issues could be resolved efficiently. AI fashion-centric solutions offer speed, consistency, cost-effectiveness, and automation, providing an efficient means to deal with these challenges. Wanna talk?
This article was originally published at blog.wideeyes.ai
