In June, Amazon started testing a new service called Prime Wardrobe with the goal of boosting fashion sales by giving shoppers one week to try out clothes at home before paying.
Amazon has already made changes to its new try-before-you-buy Prime Wardrobe service
The e-commerce giant has altered how discounts work and how many items can be ordered.
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Five months later, a check back in on the service shows that Amazon has already made several changes during this beta-testing period to how Prime Wardrobe works.
At launch, Amazon allowed customers to order between three and 15 items to try on at home before buying. The maximum has since been lowered to 10 items, signaling that perhaps too many customers were taking advantage of that threshold, but not keeping enough.
To incentivize multi-item purchases, Amazon also originally offered discounts of between 10 percent and 20 percent when a shopper kept three or more items — no matter the total order amount.
Amazon has since altered discounting to a flat discount of $20 for orders of at least $200 and a $50 discount for orders of $400 or more.
One other noticeable change is that the dedicated Prime Wardrobe digital shopping cart seems to be easier to find on Amazon.com than it was earlier. When I tested out the service in August, one of the main annoyances was that you had to use a separate shopping cart for Prime Wardrobe, which was often too difficult to find.
It’s still an issue that the service isn’t integrated into the main Amazon shopping cart, but the tweak helps. These specific changes aren’t a surprise, because the company asked a bunch of questions about the shopping cart in a post-order survey I took.
The days of Amazon not being taken seriously as an apparel destination are clearly over, with the e-commerce giant becoming a go-to for basics like t-shirts and underwear while kids clothing brands like Carter’s are creating exclusive labels just for Prime customers.
But Amazon wants more; specifically, the money you spend on more fashionable attire such as dresses, nice jeans and shoes. Prime Wardrobe is supposed to help take away some of the uncertainty of buying these items online.
In my test back in August, I ordered three items — a $12 polo shirt that carries the Amazon Essentials brand, a $39 button-down shirt by the Amazon private-label brand Buttoned Down and a pair of black Adidas sneakers.
I ended up returning all three — two didn’t fit well and the third style wasn’t for me when I saw it in person. I’ll likely try it out again, and will be smarter about ordering multiple sizes of each item, which seems like one of the obvious use cases for the service.
Correction: An earlier version of this story included incorrect discount amounts for the Prime Wardrobe service.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
