This morning I played dress-up. By myself. For the third time this week.
After hitting the snooze button and leaving myself with 10 minutes to get ready – choosing an outfit can become more of a debacle than most think. Needless to say, I eventually settled for the granny panties, guitar imprinted beanie and striking purple jacket. Yes, I know what you’re thinking – I exude style. I’m certain it was this fierce fashion sense of mine that convinced Kat to let me write on the latest fashion eCommerce site, Covet.com.

The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. Covet.com, launched by the guys who bought us Riya and visual shopping search engine Like.com is a seriously cool new site that acts as your “virtual stylist”. So, naturally, I wanted to find out more, eradicate the can't-decide-on-an-outfit problem? Yes please! So I took a look-see around this site and thought I’d share my personal sentiments from a basic user perspective. This post will look at:

• The functionality of the site from a user perspective
• The benefits of the email interaction of the site in sending weekly personal fashion updates
• The design of the site - insight compliments of a Quirky designer
• The back-end structure of the site - insight compliments of a Quirky tech boff

Functionality:

From the perspective of someone who still (occasionally) prints their emails, this site was simple to navigate and get the jist of. Good start. On your first visit to the site, Covet.com determines your own personal style – this is done when you respond to a series of photos and outfits worn by celebrities. It goes one step further in choosing your clothing style preference by asking you to choose between images that could represent your taste. Think tall Martini vs a pint of frothy Beer – geddit?

So, after having gone through this process, covet.com kindly assigns you a profile based on your choices. The fact that the process was as simple as one click was great – I really didn’t have to work hard to find out I’m an “Edgy Urban Chick”. After having been given a style profile, you are able to tweak and refine your preferences – from shoe and dress size, to brands you hate and brands you love. You can also use this process of elimination to exclude styles that you don’t find useful and choose your least favourite colours and patterns.

Email

Using the information gained from this profile, allows Covet.com to send you either daily or weekly mails featuring clothing and shoes found over thousands of online merchants – keep in mind, everything they send you will be tailored to suit your style, size and preference. Although this does have the potential to become a bit “spammy”, you have the choice of how often you’d like to receive the latest fashion findings. How do they do it? Well, only by crawling the sites of more than 5,000 retailers and using the same image recognition technology to group these together as the visual search engine, Like.com. The email is broken down into two sections – one for the items matched to your profile that are “on sale”, and another one with items that are “just in”. So, you can make an educated decision on whether to skip dinner for the week and get those sexy little black boots.

Design

This isn’t really my area of expertise, so I asked our kick-ass in-house designer, Emma Carpenter to give me a bit of insight into the design elements of the site:

“Firstly I think the functionality rocks, I love the 'Hot or Not' style of selection by clicking images. The problem starts when we hit the screen with the check boxes. Sigh. After the quick-fire selection the next pages feel like wading through treacle. I think the design is pretty mediocre. Yes, its got a bit of colour, but there is no thought, attention to detail or any typographic style. Design wise it's just boring. Have a look at http://www.net-a-porter.com for a site that mixes fashion commentary and ecommerce.”

Structure

This time, Louw, our uber-informed tech dude kindly spent some time to give us some feedback on the back-end structure of this ecommerce site.

“First off, from a technical point of view (and I wish more Web application developers out there had the guts or just freedom to do this), the developers over at Covet.com have decided: NO MORE Internet Explorer 6. Probably because anyone with enough fashion sense to be using Covet.com, will know how totally uncool it is to be making network requests with "MSIE 6" in your User agent. For this alone, they score 10 out of 10.

How does it work?  Well, without direct insight into the server side code (which, as far as I can tell, is scripted in Python), I can only speculate. 

On a high level, each image in the random array of images the user clicks on, could belong to a style, or a style group. Each click is recorded against this style. At the end of the "getting-to-know-your-style" process, the style with the highest score is the group you most probably belong to or lean towards.

This data, together with all other information that is gathered on your profile, then makes it easy for Covet.com to grab tailor made results from their search results and pop it into an email containing everything that you "love", and none (maybe less is safer) of the stuff you don't.

On a low level, much of the user interaction, like selecting what you love and what you don't, is made possible with JavaScript and jQuery, an open source JavaScript library we, at Quirk, favour. jQuery alleviates many of the cross-browser issues plain JavaScript might cause - saving developers losts of time and frustration. Yes, one semicolon ommitted or in the wrong place can "break" your entire page.”

Thanks Louw! (See, I told you, that’s how our tech guys roll).

Personal experience

One not-so-good thing I did find was the “size” element in the emails sent. Even if you are bootylicious and proud of it, if you select the XXL or largest size they had, it will still display the outfit worn on a petite model – I love fashion, but I sure do love food too and seeing a tiny model fitting into what would be my plus size outfit is just a bit strange (and disheartening). Unfortunately, when it comes to purchasing items, there is a cost incurred for shipping, although some items do offer free shipping.

Other than the fact that there is no “Contact Us” option and one has to pay in dollars for any purchase made, overall, I’m impressed. As an affiliate ecommerce site, covet.com has achieved its goal and managed to meet the needs of today’s consumers who don’t have the time during their busy days to spend browsing in shops to find their perfect fashion item. I like the fact that a company has taken the time and used the technology available and ecommerce opportunities to create a site that meets the inherent needs of men and women. It simplifies the process and makes sourcing the right items oh so EASY! In fact, within minutes of signing up, I received an email full of enticing fashion items and accessories. The next step is parting with the cash. With the help of Covet.com, playing dress-up will be faster, more fun and who knows, I may even be convinced to skip the granny panties next time and get some with more of an “edgy urban chick” vibe?

Also Check Out:

• Important e-Commerce Elements
  
• Shopping Online in South Africa: Part 2
  
• Site of Note: Spectra.com