Fashbot sets sailing

The Tommy Hilfiger- Facebook fashbot tie-up has ushered in an all new fashion experience

Tommy Hilfiger, a three-decade old fashion brand, recently hogged the headlines for a reason partly out of its wearable orbit. The past week was abuzz with the Hilfiger-Facebook linkup stories, the fashion ace stepping into fashbot (fashion chatbot) platform on social media.

The launch of the fashion line for social media star Gigi Hadid has ushered in an all new fashion experience for fashionistas of tomorrow.

“Through the bot, fashionistas can type questions or select pre-made queries to learn about Gigi, see behind-the-scenes content from the collection’s runway show event and, most importantly, shop for items from the nautical-themed clothing line,” writes Techcrunch.

The Hilfiger bot is looked upon as a daring move in the fashion world. Compared with its counterparts, a fashbot offers little space for trial and error. It demands improvement in the areas to try new wears and recommend style statements for the customer on the other end.

The merchants’ side is that they place a premium on customer satisfaction and want to go directly to the consumer as the “future of the omni-channel process.”

In the bot, the consumer can get the feel of an ‘in-con with Gigi’ like experience though no person to person communication takes place.

Similar to the unavailability of the trial-and-error facility or more than that, the absence of a native payment gateway has been a major hole in the seller-buyer equation within the bot platform. For the fashbot, the consumer was linked out to the Tommy Hilfiger website to feed in the credit card details and proceed into purchase.

However, a few days later, Facebook green-signalled incorporating payment channels into bots to help tens of thousands of chatbots awaiting in the queue. Rather than taking the consumer out of the bot atmos, accepting payments within the bots would thus be possible, announced Davis Marcus, head of Messenger, Facebook.

“Payments can now be integrated into messages, making it easy for customers to shop and purchase without leaving the app. Messages with payments utilise industry-leading controls and financial information is protected with bank-level encryption. As of today payments will be available for select developers in beta; businesses can apply through the Messenger developer webpage,” Facebook says on its developers site.