Mr Porter launches gift assistant with Facebook Messenger

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Dec 11, 2018

Mr Porter is using Facebook Messenger to help customers find the right Christmas present for themselves or their loved ones.

Introduced on one of the most used messaging apps in the Western world, the Mr Porter Style Assistant is a transaction bot designed to suggest products based on a series of customer typologies and contextualized questions.

Gift options can be filtered by style, product category and budget, before sending the customer to MrPorter.com to finish the transaction.

“With tech and innovation at the heart of our brand, we felt chat was a great new digital channel for Mr Porter to explore and experiment with to drive conversation and commerce and ultimately make choosing the perfect gift easier for everyone this year,” commented Sabah Naqushbandi, global marketing director at Mr Porter.

The menswear e-tailer is not the first to introduce a virtual gifting service with an online company. Asos unveiled a similar service with Facebook last year, while Zalando teamed up with Google Assistant on a gift guide chatbot.

But the technology is still relatively unused among fashion e-tailers, despite providing another way to engage with consumers and drive sales. According to a Business Insider report, consumers are now using messaging apps more frequently than the four main social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter). And the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025.