Online fashion platform Zalando has selected AWS as its preferred cloud provider and is now running all of its machine learning workloads on the Amazon cloud.

Zalando, which offers lifestyle and fashion products to more than 35 million customers across 17 countries, will use AWS' machine learning services to “innovate faster” and offer a “more personalised” online shopping experience, it said.

The AWS cloud will also be used by Zalando to optimise critical business functions such as supply chain management, pricing, marketing and customer care.

AWS' machine learning promises to enable Zalando to continuously improve the customer experience by reducing the time it takes to design, launch and scale new features for its e-commerce platform.

Using Amazon SageMaker to build, train and deploy machine learning models quickly, and Amazon EMR to capture, store and analyse large volumes of data, Zalando’s engineering teams can use customer purchase data to create personalised shopping features like individual product and size recommendations, and to predict a customer’s future outfit preferences.

The company said it will also be able to develop and implement new customer applications faster, such as digital avatars that allow customers to virtually try on clothes, enabling them to see which outfits fit them best without trying them on physically.

Zalando is also using AWS to offer more personalised recommendations based on style preferences or a brand’s ethical practices, predict when items are in-stock for more accurate package delivery and return times, and forecast real-time availability of the latest fashion trends.

“Working with AWS, we’ve created a next-generation machine learning platform that enables all of our data scientists and developers to collaborate better and work more efficiently with teams across the company,” said Rodrigue Schaefer, vice president for digital foundation at Zalando.

“This platform is enabling us to continuously improve the customer experience by rapidly reducing the time it takes to design and implement state-of-the-art personalisation tools and new product features,” said Schaefer.

“From better stock management to a quicker returns process, we’ve also used a range of additional AWS services to drive operational efficiencies at all stages of the customer journey.”

In other Amazon cloud news, Latin American online commerce and payments provider Mercado Libre has selected AWS as its primary cloud provider to help launch new services and drive regional expansion.

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