What Fashion’s E-Commerce and Tech Professionals Need to Know Today

Discover the most relevant industry news and insights for fashion’s e-commerce and technology professionals, updated each month to enable you to excel in job interviews, promotion conversations or perform better in the workplace by increasing your market awareness and emulating market leaders.

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Key articles and need-to-know insights for e-commerce and technology professionals today:

1. Fashion’s New Era of Product Discovery

The volume of choice is working against fashion brands, negatively affecting conversion as shoppers increasingly abandon carts. Seventy-four percent of customers report walking away from online purchases due to the volume of choice. Search remains the primary mode of online product discovery. Sixty-nine percent of customers state they go directly to a retailer’s search bar when shopping online. However, 80 percent are dissatisfied with the search experience and leave the site as a result.

Fashion brands are starting to address the challenges by using generative AI. While promising, these efforts are a work in progress. Revolve has reported significant increases in customer engagement from its experiments with generative AI-powered search. Kering, on the other hand, introduced Madeline, a ChatGPT-powered shopping assistant, in 2023 on KNXT, a site it uses to test digital innovations, only to later disable the feature.

2. Fashion and Beauty Need to Prepare For a TikTok Ban

TikTok is scrambling to push back the January 19 deadline for parent company ByteDance to sell it to a buyer the US deems acceptable. If it fails, come that date, internet hosting services and app stores such as Apple’s and Google’s will face significant penalties for continuing to support the app, effectively freezing TikTok in its tracks and causing it to descend quickly into obsolescence. In December, the company filed for an emergency injunction asking that the ban not take effect before the US Supreme Court has a chance to review its appeal of last week’s ruling upholding the forced sale.

Even a one-month shutdown could cause it to lose roughly one-third of its daily users in the US and 29 percent of its targeted global advertising revenue for 2025. Though the ban centres on issues of US national security, it will have undeniable implications for fashion and beauty businesses. While TikTok’s main value to brands is still as a way to market their products to its users, including 170 million of them in the US, many also now sell through TikTok Shop, the in-app e-commerce offering that launched in September 2023.

3. Puma Is Bringing AI-Generated Design to the Football Pitch

Puma is using AI to bring Manchester City fans closer to the game. Earlier this month, the company launched a platform that allows the football club’s followers to use generative AI to design a new uniform for the team. One of those designs, to be selected through a contest, will become Manchester City’s third kit, typically worn in around 10 to 12 matches, for the 2026 season. For its platform, Puma partnered with the AI studio Deep Objects, founded by the creative agency FTR, which has worked with Puma on a number of prior projects, including the brand’s runway shows in recent years.

“We want to really break down those barriers and make it easy for anybody to come in and design,” Ivan Dashkov, Puma’s head of emerging marketing technology said. “Literally, you can make a kit in under two minutes, which I think is very exciting.” Puma joins a host of companies seizing on generative AI’s design abilities. Brands including Norma Kamali, Collina Strada and Mango are embracing the technology to create their own collections, while a number of start-ups are using it to power fashion design platforms.

4. Fashion’s Innovation Dilemma

In the three years since its surprise acquisition, Nike was never able to articulate how RTFKT’s virtual sneakers tied into its core business of selling very real shoes. And so it remained a side project, spinning out digital goods for a small fanbase, with occasional ventures into the real world, including Nike Dunks transmuted through the lens of video games that came equipped with chips connected to a digital collectible.

At the time of the purchase, John Donahoe, a former tech executive who was about a year into his tenure as Nike CEO, was betting on a future where shoppers would spend ever-larger amounts of cash on virtual goods in video games and other digital environments. Web3 proponents argued minting those goods on the blockchain as NFTs offered a way to prove digital ownership, in theory laying the foundation for a thriving new type of virtual economy. Back in 2021, RTFKT was a leader in the space, making millions on sales of sneaker NFTs and online avatars designed by artist Takashi Murakami.

5. The Next E-Commerce Battlefield Will Be Price, Not Convenience

Amazon’s answer to Temu and Shein is here. The US e-commerce juggernaut recently introduced Haul, its long-rumoured rival to the fast-growing, ultra-inexpensive Chinese retailers. The site is filled with home goods, electronics, beauty accessories and lots of fashion, all for under $20. The design seems aimed directly at young consumers. There are emojis everywhere, including animated ones on a banner declaring “Crazy low prices start here.” Even the name references the popular “haul” videos on social media.

Haul copies its competition’s playbook, shipping products straight from warehouses overseas — often in China — to US customers. However, while Amazon made its name on low costs combined with convenience and super-fast shipping, on Haul, “typical delivery times” are one to two weeks. By offering customers even lower prices on certain items if they’re willing to wait, “Amazon is in some ways admitting that e-commerce is not one-dimensional,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of market research firm Marketplace Pulse. Still, it may not be enough to slow down Temu and Shein.

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