My Shop Pal gets me fashion product recommendations on MyShopPal.com (Fashion merchandising)

Fashion merchandising news: I have noticed the official release of MyShopPal.com, "an intelligent search engine for fashion shopping". Users get personalized product recommendations based on their preferences (e.g. brands and online stores), their measurements (e.g. waist size and shape of shoulders), and "fashion and expert knowledge" from professionals. Think Amazon recommendations based not only on your purchasing behavior and preferences, but also on your body shape and sense of fashion. For each item, you get a FAP (Fashion, Attractiveness, and Preferences) score that tells you whether it is made for you.
The site has partnered with several online shopping sites where users can actually buy the products. This comparison shopping site for fashion enthusiasts is just starting out, so it was sometimes difficult for me to find products with a FAP score as MyShoPal's experts had not yet rated the items I wanted. The site currently offers apparel, jewelry, handbags, and beauty products.

Source: MyShopPal.com press release

The full press release:

MyShopPal.com launches an intelligent shopping website that combines fashion and expert knowledge with personal preferences to help shoppers find what is right for them. The website uses a patent pending personalized rating system to measure the suitability of the products for the users.

San Jose, Calif. (PRWEB) August 2, 2007 — MyShopPal.com (http://www.myshoppal.com/), a subsidiary of Neo Notion, Inc., today announced the public beta release of an intelligent shopping website that helps shoppers with its ability to tell what is actually right for them from the zillions of choices made possible by the Internet. MyShopPal.com combines the fashion and expert knowledge with the style and preferences of users to rate the suitability of products for them. For example, if you are buying clothes, it will tell you whether they will look good on you or not. If an item does not suit you, the site is very upfront in pointing that out. "Users can also continuously train MyShopPal.com about what they like and what they don't to further refine the search results," says MyShopPal.com's CEO and founder Dileep Panjwani.

The core strength of MyShopPal.com technology is its patent pending personalized rating system, which it calls FAP scoring system, where FAP stands for Fashion, Attractiveness, and Preferences. "A FAP score is a measure of a product's suitability for a user. We say that a product is right for the user, if it looks good on her by complementing her body characteristics, qualifies the goodness criteria set by experts, matches with her fashion style, and caters to her preferences. The higher the FAP score of a product is, the better the chances are that it is right for the user. All this is done with the help of a simple profile which the user creates when she joins MyShopPal.com," says Mr. Panjwani.

The site also presents the detailed analysis that goes behind in measuring the FAP score of a product. If a product gets high score, the analysis explains why the product will look good on the user. Similarly if the score is low, the analysis lists the reasons why the product may not suit the user. In its beta release of the site, MyShopPal.com supports clothes, shoes, bags, jewelry, and health & beauty products. Support for other categories will be added in the future. The site also has added many Web 2.0 features such as allowing users to shop with their friends by letting them share their profile.

"To ensure that the user gets accurate recommendations, we took the help of experts in various fields. We consulted dozens of fashion experts to build a 'Looking Good Model' that uses detailed body characteristics of people to figure out what will look good on them. We have consulted gemologists to understand the quality of diamonds and gems, and how to estimate the market price of jewelry. We have hired cosmetologists, who know what type of health and beauty products will suit them by analyzing the color shades and ingredients of these products. All these experts have enriched the knowledge base of MyShopPal.com's intelligent engine," says Mr. Panjwani.

MyShopPal.com has already partnered with most of the premium online stores to bring close to 2 million products to its users in apparel, jewelry, health and beauty product categories.

MyShopPal.com management team believes the timing for this venture could not be better. According to the first part of the State of Retailing Online 2007 report, the tenth annual Shop.org study conducted by Forrester Research, the apparel category reached $18.3 billion in 2006 and it is first time it surpassed the money spent on Computers or Electronics.

Even when the sales for clothes, shoes, and bags have been soaring, surprisingly the return rates are as high as 14 percent, which is twice compared to other products. Not being able to find out the suitability of the items is one of the major deterrents to sales. In a survey MyShopPal.com conducted recently, the 42 percent of the retail consumers said that they would prefer to have some idea about how well the item will work for them before investing into it.

MyShopPal.com addresses exactly this problem of suitability with its intelligent shopping engine. In its three month long private beta, many users of the site confessed, "We learned more about what looks good on us after using MyShopPal.com. It is not only a great tool for online shopping, but it also helps us to improve our shopping offline."