Zalando lets your smartphone choose your gift

Starting from October, you can literally ask your smart phone which gift it wants to pick for you. Zalando and Google are collaborating on a gift-picking chat bot for the virtual Google Assistant, which is present on all Android phones.

Chat bot helps to find gifts

Zalando aims to launch a ‘Geschenkefinder’ (gift finder) at the end of October, so German consumers can ask a chat bot which gifts they should buy their family or friends. After asking the customer a series of questions, the chat bot will use Google Assistant to find the perfect gift – which can of course be bought straight away through Zalando’s Distributed Commerce. The German fashion web shop already uses chat bots on social media like Facebook Messenger, but wants to take them one step further now.

The collaboration is part of Google’s plan to allow third parties to build apps for the Google Assistant, a plan in which Zalando is an important partner. “People are spending more and more time on social apps, and as a customer centric company we have to be where the consumer is, to innovate in order to tackle emerging and foreseeable customer needs and pain-points”, explains Zalando’s vice-president for strategy Nicolas Borg. “The collaboration with Google allows us to move another step ahead in the area of Conversational Commerce, and to further explore a field that is going to be enormously relevant for the future of online shopping.”