---
title: "AI agents and apparel stores"
source: "https://ottom.io/verticals/apparel"
summary: "Apparel is the category where the buy stage fails most structurally, because almost every purchase requires choosing a size and a colour before anything can go in a basket. A control that a person operates with a mouse and an eye is the single point an agent has to get through, and it is the point most often built without a form field behind it."
---

# AI agents and apparel stores

Apparel is the category where the buy stage fails most structurally, because almost every purchase requires choosing a size and a colour before anything can go in a basket. A control that a person operates with a mouse and an eye is the single point an agent has to get through, and it is the point most often built without a form field behind it.

## What makes this category harder

- Two option dimensions, size and colour, must both be resolved before the item is buyable.
- Size guidance is frequently published as an image, so an agent asked for a fit cannot answer.
- Stock varies per combination, so "in stock" on the product is not an answer about the size asked for.

## Where agents stop, and why here

- size swatches are the commonest hover-only control in retail (https://ottom.io/learn/stalls/hover-only-variant-picker)
- a size grid with no per-combination data cannot be reasoned about (https://ottom.io/learn/stalls/no-variant-data)
- size charts and returns terms are usually graphics (https://ottom.io/learn/stalls/policy-in-image)

## Questions

### Our size guide is a chart image. Does it need to be text?

It needs to exist as text somewhere, not instead of the chart. An agent asked for something that fits a given measurement has nothing to work from otherwise, and will either skip you or recommend a size it guessed at, which is worse.