Snapchat & Fit Analytics: Redefining Customer Experience

On March 17, 2020, Snapchat bought German giant Fit Analytics for an as-yet-undisclosed amount. Like Facebook and Instagram before it, the social network is entering the world of e-commerce. But the stakes of this merger seem all the higher. 

1. Snapchat and Fit Analytics: the main players in this merger

Snapchat: 

The little white ghost is a social network created in 2011, which allows you to share photos and videos with your friends in an ephemeral way. The strength of Snapchat is the creation of filters that punctuate the lives of its 249 million daily users.

Fit Analytics:

Founded in 2010, Fit Analytics is a German company specialized in solving the size problem on e-commerce sites of fashion brands like Asos, Puma, or Patagonia. It calculates the ideal size of a user from his morphological information: height, weight, belly shape, and hips. Today, Fit Analytics has more than 18,000merchants as customers. 

2. Why can this acquisition revolutionize e-commerce?

2020: the Covid crisis has turned retail upside down   

The closure of physical stores, the impossibility of trying on clothes in stores, the rise of e-commerce in France... Covid has pushed companies to go digital. They have also had to rethink the entire customer journey to try to offer the same experience online as in a physical store.  

This new wave of online consumption has pushed Facebook, Instagram, and now Snapchat to include e-commerce at the heart of their business models.

Merging a customer experience expert with a size calculation specialist, what could it look like?

E-shop user experience at the heart of acquisition

Snapchat, already a master in the art of artificial intelligence, could revolutionize e-commerce by recreating the remote store experience. 

But how? 

We can imagine that the merger of these two experts will lead to the development of virtual fitting. 

For example, Snapchat users could try on their favorite brands at home before ordering them online. Or that after a quick scan of a photo, a customer could find out his or her size at a particular brand.

Snapchat has already used this technology in augmented reality campaigns with cosmetics brand NYX. Users could try on products directly through the creation of filters that correspond to the different types of products of the brand: lipstick, eyeshadow, blush, etc.

Ecological spin-offs:

Today, brands like Zalando play on the "order now try later" strategy, which pushes consumers to order several sizes and colors of the same garment to try on at home and then send back those that do not fit. This practice has a significant environmental impact. Forbes has identified more than 17 billion product returns each year, emitting 4.7 million tons of CO2.

And yet, there are ways to effectively reduce these returns. We advise you to read our article: how to improve your eco-responsible image by reducing your returns?

Snapchat's latest takeover could make a difference on the environmental level. The possibility to try on clothes remotely could reduce the return rates, which are between 15 and 20% in the fashion industry.

Customers will be guided to choose the right size and try on clothes remotely. This will reduce, for example, multiple orders of the same product and returns, as well as the carbon footprint of e-commerce.

3. In brief...

Snapchat's acquisition of Fit Analytics is a source of speculation about its potential. It could be a value-add for fashion brands in terms of customer experience, environmental footprint, and cost reduction.

But, today, a week after the deal, Snapchat still hasn't said anything about itsplans for Fit Analytics. We're waiting to see what happens next!