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Rakuten acquires Fits.Me to strengthen ecommerce in fashion industry

Tuesday 14 July 2015 11:46 CET | News

Rakuten, an ecommerce marketplace, has acquired Fits.Me, a virtual fitting room startup, in order to expand its operations in the area of fashion.

Fits.me is a startup founded in Estonia and headquartered in London, UK. It develops “virtual fitting rooms” or two-way technology that lets online buyers who can’t physically try something on better visualise how those items might fit them. At the same time, it allows retailers to collect more information about the preferences and interests of visitors to their websites.

Rakuten plans to run Fits.me as a standalone business, where it will continue to develop its technology, grow its business and work with existing clients. The latter includes Thomas Pink, Hugo Boss and home shopping channel QVC. Fits.me will also be working more closely with Rakuten. They include fashion and beauty products sold through its main Rakuten.com portal.

The company is focused on fashion websites like StyLife in Japan and Vault in the US. Rakuten also has a stake in Pinterest, the image-led social website that has recently moved deeper into ecommerce. Among the consumer-focused services that Fits.me has created to date are robot mannequins that adjust customer size to show online how an item they want to buy will look like.

Prior to this, Rakuten’s most recent acquisition was of Japanese travel website Voyagin. Other acquisitions in Europe have included the messaging app Viber, headquartered in Cyprus, video streaming website Wuaki and French ecommerce portal Priceminister.


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Keywords: Rakuten, purchase, virtual fitting room, startup, Fits.Me fashion commerce, online sales, clothes
Categories: Payments & Commerce
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