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I don't think this will have much of an impact on Stitch Fix.

Stitch Fix's proposition isn't free returns - plenty of places sell clothes online with free returns - Stitch Fix's appeal is that they will do the work of picking out potential items for you so that you don't have to comb through hundreds of items to find what you want.

It mostly just seems like Amazon is bringing free returns to the low end of the market.

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Bear in mind that Amazon already has all the pieces in place to offer ML-driven recommendations, and I would be surprised if it didn't offer that option once this gets out of beta.

It's possible ML-driven recommendations may surpass the recommendations of StitchFix's "personal stylists" in terms of accuracy. And unless "personal stylists" is just a market-facing name for "algorithms," ML-driven recommendations by Amazon would certainly surpass StitchFix in terms of efficiency and operating costs.

You might be surprised how much data science drives StitchFix; I sure was when this came out recently: http://algorithms-tour.stitchfix.com/

Wow. It doesn't tell you fully how they actually do it, but I'm still a little surprised they put that out there

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