eBay is taking a step out of the online shopping game and into offline retail, teaming up with designer Rebecca Minkoff to open new "smart stores" for the holidays.
The stores will be located in New York and San Francisco, and they will feature large mirrors that shoppers will be able to use to look through the store's inventory and choose the items they want to try on, according to The Verge. Customers will also receive a text alert when their clothes are ready to try on, and they will also have the option of ordering a drink.
These high-tech mirrors, which double as touchscreens, are also present in the dressing rooms for shoppers to use for adjusting the lightening to see how their outfits look in different settings. The clothes will come with RFID tags that all the room to recognize the items and figure out what's in stock, and customers only have to press a button to have a stylist bring in the outfit in different size and color.
The room will also use these tags to recognize the outfits shoppers try on, which will be saved to the shopper's personal profile in case they decide to not buy it now by come back for it next time, The Verge reported. The e-commerce giant plans on offering personalized recommendations based on shoppers' activity at the stores in the past.
Customers can also use the mirrors to pay for items instead of going to the register to purchase new clothes.
The stores will also use cameras to track individual shoppers while they look for items, which eBay says will be done anonymously, Wired reported. Store managers plan to study the behavior of shoppers to make improvements to their services, such as layout and price displays.
eBay joins other online retailers, such as Amazon and Foursquare, that are starting to put an equal amount of effort in physical stores as they do in their online stores.
"People still want to use their five senses, not just the one sense you use when you're doing e-commerce," said Steve Yankovich, head of innovation and new ventures at eBay. "So physical retail, a showroom, I think will never go away."
