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Comment by gmac | Hacker News Reader

In the UK supermarket deliveries are well established. My family gets 2 or 3 Ocado deliveries a week (they have a Prime equivalent where you pay £11 a month to get free deliveries on orders over £40, within a one-hour time slot, usually available at about 24 hours' notice).

Add that to Amazon, and I basically now only shop in shops when size/fit or feel are crucial — clothes, shoes, etc. And I really resent this — I'm trying to figure out the brands and sizes of jeans and so on that I can just reorder online as necessary, but shops screw this up by changing their ranges all the damn time. I feel like there must be a market opportunity there ...

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I love my Ocado deliveries, especially because they auto-populate the delivery based on our past orders + some light guidance (list of stuff to never add automatically + list of stuff to always add) and it's generally "close enough" that I often can't even be bothered to log in to check or modify the order...

Like you, I really resent the clothes shopping as the last bastion...

There are options there too, though, I just haven't gotten around to testing them.

E.g. ASOS offers a premier type subscription for a tenner that gives you free next day delivery and one free returns pickup per order, so you actually can order stuff, try it on and send it back as much as you like. They focused on women first but apparently have a large range for men too. I think you also can hand in returns at local corner shops many places if it's not convenient to have them pick it up...

M&S is pretty reliable for clothes shopping. They deliver next day and I don't find their fit changes within the same category.

So many places have great return policies, so it doesn't really matter anymore. There are places that specifically encourage you to buy like 2-3 pairs of shoes for example and ship back the ones that don't fit. If you are normally a size 10.5 shoe you can happily order 10/10.5/11 and then send the 2 that don't fit back for free. http://www.zappos.com/ is a good example. free shipping both ways.

Good point, but I find there are 3 obstacles to this.

1) Many shoes (and most jeans too) don't fit me in whatever size — either the fit is more complicated than a simple scalar, and/or sometimes I'd need a size somewhere between two of the sizes offered.

2) Returns on the scale needed are thus generally a bit of a pain.

3) I suspect that the overhead of paying for lots of returns makes these services rather dear, and since I find jeans and shoes way overpriced anyway this puts me off. (This one is probably all in my head, but it's no less real for that).

What I'd really like is a service where I could identify to it some clothes/shoes that fit me really well, and it could offer me a wide range of other clothes/shoes with a very similar fit. And isn't outrageously dear. (By all means, tell me this exists!).

For me your #2 is the deal breaker. If I have to box a bunch of stuff back up and drop it off somewhere it's more hassle than shopping at a brick & mortar shoe store. There would have to be a huge price advantage to make it worthwhile.

There are so many delivery services... there should really be an inverse. "We'll pick things up for you." I bet Shyp could branch out into this, though it's clearly not their target scenario http://www.shyp.com/

Its already a thing, but its expensive so tends not to be offered, although Amazon will arrange pick up for a small fee.

Most of the shippers happily pick up boxes from you. I have ups pick things up at my house all the time. Just put it in the box and stick the pre printed return label on the side.

Yes, people are trying. The problem is hard.

https://www.rivetandcuff.com/find-your-fit

It's a shame that their cheapest pair of jeans is over $100. While I'm definitely a fan of getting something quality that lasts a while (rather than just buying new pairs of shitty $20 jeans every year) it would be great if there was something in the $50-80 range. Doesn't have to be the fanciest raw selvedge denim or whatever but just some solid, well constructed jeans made from good fabric would be my ideal.

I'm surprised - is this a real problem? I thought 99% of all blue jeans in the world are made at the same Korean factory. Maybe they construct them to different standards? That makes sense I guess.

We chose Men's jeans and the higher price point as a way to constrain the problem, and test our algorithms and technology. It turns out they work very well, but usability is not close to what it needs to be. We also have plans to use this for simple basics too. For example, am I a Medium or Large for that T-Shirt? Or, I liked that shirt at the Gap, but the one I just bought from J Crew fits totally differently. We also can use the phone to get measurements from, say, a foot so that we can then get the right shoes. These are all easily solvable with data and we can use image technology to capture a lot of it. But, we need more data. If anyone on the thread would help and go through the Find Your Fit process (again, we know it is not the best experience), we can add a coupon HACKERNEWS and take 40% off to get the price into the zone your talking about.

Oh wow, I just happened to see this reply and I appreciate the feedback. I was mostly venting about the state of nice jeans in general. I've found there isn't usually a massive difference between $20 jeans and $50 jeans (quality-wise) but outside of the crowdfund-model stuff like Gustin (which has really been upping prices lately), it's hard to find something that fits in the gap between $50 Levis and $150-250 designer stuff.

When I get home later I will try to remember to give this a shot. The concept is awesome and it really is a "value add" worth some markup if you can shop online with some realistic expectation of fit.

And I understand the issue with less expensive stuff. The tolerances on cheap clothing (and plenty of not so cheap clothing) must make it hard. I've bought multiple pairs of the same "number" Levis and they fit completely differently due to how they cut the fabric I guess.

Zappos is a great example, a lot of retailers have good return policies too. However, usually the brands themselves don't have great return policies. Unlike Amazon/Zappos the return policies for each brand are different and the shopper has to keep track of them/figure out individually which is a big pain.

    So many places have great return policies, so it doesn't really matter anymore ….  http://www.zappos.com/ is a good example.

Of course it doesn't undermine your point, but it's worth noting that this is not a fundamentally different example to Amazon; Zappos is, at least in a sense, part of the Amazon empire (http://blogs.zappos.com/ceoletter). To be fair, they did have the same great return policies before the acquisition / merger / whatever.

(Another example of a fantastic return policy, in a rather different domain, is REI's (http://www.rei.com/help/return-policy.html). It used to be even better—lifetime, or maybe just 10 years?—but my understanding is that people would take ridiculous advantage of it.)

To add to this, Tesco does unlimited Tues-Thurs deliveries for £3/month or £6/month for any day. Minimum order size £25 for hour slots.

I hardly ever go to the grocery store now, because with such a low minimum order I can order very frequently. The prices are generally better than Ocado too.

> (they have a Prime equivalent where you pay £11 a month to get free deliveries on orders over £40, within a one-hour time slot, usually available at about 24 hours' notice)

This is great. The last time I looked (admittedly not too recently), delivery in my area of the US was just too expensive to bother, living around the corner from a supermarket and all. If it got cheaper, I'd be on that in a second.

As for the market opportunity, I'm almost positive I saw a site that "translated" sizes between brands, but I can't find the thing anymore. It's worth searching for though.

In my experience, you sort of need to be in a situation where either 1.) You're price-insensitive and really don't like going to the grocery store or 2.) It's inconvenient to go to the store (no car, young kids, not very mobile). The one time I used grocery delivery was when I was on crutches. Peapod was "OK" but the selection was less than the store, they'd be out of things and either didn't substitute or would substitute something I didn't want, and required a bit of planning. I last looked at their site a month or so ago and it looks exactly like it did those 10 years ago.

Instacart, on the other hand, I might use given that there's no Whole Foods especially convenient but--doubtless for exactly that reason--it's not available in my area.

> It's inconvenient to go to the store (no car, young kids, not very mobile).

Or... "have a job and don't like to waste time shopping". Seriously it's much faster to order it online, and delivery is like £2 or something. Plus there is usually a better range online, and you can see how much you are spending before you get to the checkout.

Personally, I prefer to look at the produce, meat, and fish. That said, if there were better delivery options available in my area, I'd probably use them at least some of the time. But Peapod is my only option and it's not great IMO; it certainly doesn't have the selection that the B&M grocery stores do. (And if I'm going to have to go to the store anyway for some things, I don't find much of a win in having some of my groceries delivered.)

> As for the market opportunity, I'm almost positive I saw a site that "translated" sizes between brands, but I can't find the thing anymore. It's worth searching for though.

Small world I guess. I'm working on a project that is aiming to solve this exact issue - http://shopolette.com. Very early days though.

Growing up and going to university in Montreal most grocery stores would deliver within a certain radius for 2-3 bucks extra. You could walk/bus to the store, buy as much food as you need, regardless of being able to carry it, leave your address with them and they'd deliver it later that day. Better yet you could phone in your order in the morning and pay an extra $2 (this is less than 5 years ago by the way), someone would pick out your order for you, and then it would be delivered that afternoon.

Regarding size/fit, I can't wait until even that is solved. I just pre-ordered a pair of D2 Ultrawired orthotic cycling shoes. It's a long lead time to get your shoes, 4-5 months, and the first step is getting a measurement kit to precisely measure your feet and create molds of your feet. These are then used to create custom lasts upon which each shoe is based.

There is a lot of room for technology to greatly improve the process of getting a great fit for many types of products.

I've found a lot of / increasing variation amongst units of the same clothing item, here in the U.S. For jeans and casual slacks, for example, I've become accustomed to taking several units of the same measure to the dressing room and selecting those that fit best. Individual units often vary quite significantly, even when from the same stack in the same store.

I'm not much of a clothes hog nor shopper, but LL Bean has had the most regular cuts that I've found, in my quite limited experience. I used to be able to order an item and, if the same size in that item had previously fit me, count on the new item fitting. Although more recently, while using one of their stores, I found more variation in their jeans. I'm glad I didn't order my last batch by mail and have to return 1 or 2 out of 5.

The fitting problem in online retail is well known, and some companies have already worked on it:

for shoes: http://shoefitr.com/

For clothes : fits.me or "clothes horse" or others.

I wonder what prevents amazon from introducing such technologies at scale ?

For many clothing products, Amazon displays a histogram of how previous purchasers have found the fit (too small,..,fits perfectly,..,too large) and a summary (51% of customers say this runs large).

shoefitr is so close.

Now let me scan my foot instead of "I mostly fit into size X", and you've got a great solution.

Google is starting to sell tango tablets which include 3d-scanning , for everybody ,for $512. So maybe we're not far from what you suggest.

Scan? A picture of my foot next to a ruler, please. Or some other standard-sized reference object, like an electrical outlet.

A 2D scan, though probably not what the parent comment intended, implies a size via a fixed DPI. A 3D scan, similarly, can measure actual dimensions without requiring a reference object.

Maybe men's shoes are different, but in women's shoes, you want to know the shape of the arch. Trust me, it matters :)

Interesting. It looks like a much harder problem to solve in the United States because of the sheer size of this country. http://www.sarmonster.net/UK.htm

Many Amazon clothing related items have a great no-questions return policy. So, you can order things you want to try and then return them if they aren't what you want. No return shipping costs charged (directly).

www.makeyourownjeans.com

You have to iterate a bit to find what measurements actually work for you, and I got the style really wrong a couple of times. But once you have it figured out, you're set.

There are probably better websites for this, too.

Thanks for the link. They have reasonable prices. Know of any others?

In S Korea, you don't even need to order groceries. You can supposedly order ALL kinds of dishes to be delivered to your home. Or so I saw on youtube.

Most brands of jeans do the same cuts every year - just different washes. I personally am a fan of diesel jeans (waykee).

Shoes are more tricky...

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