At any given time, Fanatics offers more than 1.5 million unique SKUs for sports fans to purchase, from jerseys and hats to team-branded streetwear and socks. Searching for these items is now even easier with a new feature called “Shop the Look,” created with the help of OpenAI’s Codex.
Fanatics’ product assortment reflects the company’s rise to a large sports industry platform, with deals with nearly every major sports league and team around the world. Fanatics Commerce manufactures more than 45 million products each year and sells them to customers in more than 180 countries.
But Justin Tsai, chief product officer at Fanatics Commerce, said growth has also created challenges for the company.
“One of the problems that we continued to have was that customers come to our site and we operate hundreds of these sites, and their challenge is that they’re constantly trying to look through our very large catalog to figure out what they can buy,” he said.
Tsai said customer shopping sessions routinely average more than 30 minutes, and that time has become more complex as Fanatics releases more than 1,000 new products each week.
On each product page, “Shop the Look” suggests coordination with other in-stock items to match your team and desired style.
Traditional shopping curation strategies like photo shoots and stylized costumes have lead times and don’t necessarily work for Fanatics’ rapidly growing product pool or quickly released items like championship shirts and hats, Tsai said.
Even for sports fans, random suggestions don’t work. “No Los Angeles Dodgers fan wants to match San Francisco Giants items…In our world, team and player alignment is very important,” he said.
Even though Fanatics has grown into a multibillion-dollar business, team merchandise remains its largest source of revenue. Fanatics founder and CEO Michael Rubin told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” earlier this month that the company’s commerce business will have sales of more than $7 billion this year, while its collectibles business, which includes Topps trading cards, had sales of about $5.5 billion.
OpenAI has been experimenting with shopping tools for ChatGPT since the chatbot’s launch, including the ability last fall to allow users to buy products from sellers directly within ChatGPT. However, CNBC reports that the company has ended its instant checkout efforts and is now working directly with retailers to create dedicated apps within ChatGPT.
The new Fanatics feature is another way OpenAI leverages technology across shopping. Rosemary DeArago, head of industry GTM at OpenAI, said this personalization problem in retail is an “old problem.” The rise of e-commerce has given retailers new ways to “know your customer’s fingerprints” (such as past purchase history, where they’re browsing your website from, and what accounts they’re logged into), but these efforts can still miss the mark.
“Before, we were trying to piece together something suitable to show to customers,” DeArago said. “With AI, we can perform more definitive matching and take personalization in next-level ways.”
Fanatics.com’s Shop The Look feature
fanatic
Shop the Look uses OpenAI’s Codex to create tools that parse product and catalog data to find compatible items and reevaluate recommendations, ultimately creating looks that suggest hats, socks, and other accessories to go with the jersey fans are considering buying.
Tsai said the number of views for recommended items increased by 10% after introducing the new feature. He also said suggested items will help shoppers be “more confident” about the items they’re considering purchasing by seeing how they fit with other teams’ gear.
D’Arago said that while there is always room for a more curated look and the ability to try on products in the shopping experience, integrating AI into such efforts shows there is “a tremendous opportunity to enhance the existing experience” by narrowing down large product choices and pointing out the right ones for valuable purchases, such as authentic team jerseys.
