Many big companies, most notable among them eBay and Amazon, have been trying to garner a bigger slice of the lucrative apparel pie online. Though they’ve improved their fashion pages, their static platforms may ultimately constrain them. Meanwhile Shopstyle.com and other dedicated fashion sites have gathered fans.

To add to the conundrum, Google has now created an E-commerce site that promises to improve how fashion is sold and presented online. Boutiques.com is set to change the way people shop for clothes and accessories online.

Features of Boutiques.com

The site has many capabilities and components, which even Google engineers find it hard to qualify. Sample some of them here:

1. It’s a collection of virtual boutiques merchandised or, ‘curated’ by retailers, bloggers, designers, celebrities as well as regular folks.

2. You can opt to shop in the style of, say, Mary-Kate, Ashley Olsen or Carey Mulligan – among the many celebrities who have signed up for its launch.

3. You can also make your own boutique and gather followers who perhaps will like to comment on your fashion taste and style quotient. It also acts as a source of inspiration.

4. The site includes boutiques that carry choices inspired by a celebrity’s or designer style. It’s generated by algorithms — along with product photographs much sharper and larger than on other shopping websites.

5. If you can’t make out how to wear your new leopard pumps, a street-style photographs’ panel on the site will visualize them for you in more expressive ways. The inspiration panel will automatically adjust for them, Irrespective of your style preference.

Ability to accurately grasp your preferences

That may well be ultimate game-changer from Boutiques.com – how accurately it is able to grasp your preferences to offer you exactly what you want.

As online shoppers usually experience, search engines often give stuff they don’t really demand. However, Boutiques.com’s process is passed through what experienced style experts conveyed to Google code writers about the finer aspects of fashion, and visual search technology. Incidentally, it was developed by a Silicon Valley company, Like.com, co-founded by Munjal Shah that Google acquired for a reported sum of $100 million last summer. Before the buyout, Like.com had actually created many fashion E-commerce platforms, including the styling tool Couturious.com, and Covet.com.

Fueled by new gadgets such as the iPad in part and also more money spent on technology by retailers, online sales have tended to outpace brick-and-mortar sales. According to analysts, E-commerce has caught a second wind, in the last 12 months or so. Internet sales of apparel/accessories, according to Forrester, will account for almost 14 percent ($25 billion, of the $173 billion Americans expected to spend online) this year. In a quest to capture the fast-expanding market, Boutiques.com works on a premise that online fashion shopping must be curatorial and universal at the same time.