Last month online retailer ASOS launched its ASOS Stylist App in ChatGPT, which allows users in the UK and US to discover products directly on the agentic platform before completing purchases on the retailers website.

As part of the app experience, customers can browse products and receive styling advise and recommendations.

Head of Digital Product at ASOS Melissa Lim explains that the retailer decided to implement an AI stylist feature on ChatGPT because it had found that consumers were increasingly using agentic platforms as part of their shopping journey.

She says: “For us, this is about being present where customers are already discovering fashion and making sure ASOS is part of that inspiration journey, rather than sitting on the side-lines.

“The ASOS Stylist app helps us show up in that moment of inspiration, reach new potential customers and drive discovery back to ASOS.com.”

According to Lim, the ASOS Stylist app in ChatGPT is part of its strategy to reduce friction in the shopping experience. It’s part of a plan to meet consumers where they are.

She adds: “It is also a natural extension of our role as The Stylist at ASOS: helping customers discover, combine and wear fashion with confidence.

“By bringing that styling support into new platforms, we can show up earlier in the inspiration journey and make it easier for customers to turn ideas into outfits and outfits into purchases.

Lim highlights that the stylist tool recommends products that are “genuinely” right for the consumer.

She says: “At ASOS, we see our role as helping people style themselves with confidence, not steering them towards products that serve a short-term commercial objective.

“The value of this experience lies in giving customers recommendations they can trust, because building that trust over time matters far more than any immediate gain. That principle was fundamental to how we designed the stylist.”

She explains that up until now, ChatGPT has primarily been a text-focused experience. However, fashion is a visual experience and can oftentimes be an emotional purchase. Movement, draping and fabric details all come into consideration when buying clothes.

She says: “Our experience is designed to be highly visual, bringing immersive product imagery and video, including livestream content, directly into the chat.

“We’ve applied learnings from years refining the e-commerce journey on ASOS to create familiar user interface (UI) patterns so shopping in ChatGPT feels more familiar. This shows in the way ASOS Stylist presents an edit or recommends similar items as alternatives.”

She highlights that the retailer’s Stylist app enables its customers to shop more “confidently” as it offers advice and guided conversation on how to shop for a particular body shape or style.

She says: “User research and A/B test insights from our product pages also show that videos provide more nuanced information about fit, so bringing this more prominently within the chat experience allows customers to better visualise how an item might look like on them.”

Lim adds that the retailer made the decision not to allow consumers to log in to their ASOS accounts through the ChatGPT for the initial release, so consumers are referred back to ASOS.

However, if customers have chosen to preserve its chat history within ChatGPT itself, the stylist will have access to previous conversations.

Lim says: “It’s still early days, but so far we have seen promising early engagement, with traffic from the ChatGPT channel increasing since launch, especially from new users.

“Once this new audience lands on ASOS, we see them actively browsing and saving products rather than leaving without any further interaction.”

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