CLOSE Amazon has unveiled Prime Wardrobe, a subscription service that lets users try out clothing and accessories. Prime members can use the new service for free. Time 
 
 Amazon announced a beta test of a "try before you buy" clothing distribution program called Prime Wardrobe on June 20, 2017. (Photo: Amazon) 
 
 SAN FRANCISCO —Amazon wants to make clothing purchases easier with a new program it plans to launch called Prime Wardrobe, a service that allows customers to order clothes, keep them for a week and return whatever they don’t like for free. 
 
 Prime Wardrobe shares some similarities with other “try before you buy” programs such as Stitch Fix and Nordstrom’s Trunk Club, though these choose clothing options for customers. In Amazon's case, the customer makes all the choices. 
 
 Any Prime member in the United States can choose between three and 15 items of clothing, shoes or accessories, which will be shipped to them for free. 
 
 They then have up to seven days to try the clothing on. Anything they don’t want, for whatever reason, can be shipped back in the same reusable box, which comes with a prepaid label. Amazon picks up the shipping cost. 
 
 There is no upfront charge; payment only comes after the seven days. Customers get a 10% discount if they keep three or four items, 20% off for five or more items. 
 
 The consumer is already using the bedroom as the new fitting room so that’s not so much what’s new, said Amit Sharma, CEO of Narvar, a company that offers delivery and return support to online retailers. 
 
 “This is more of an effort to drive consideration for Amazon as a legitimate outlet to buy clothing, and to gain visibility for their apparel offerings from well-regarded brands like Calvin Klein, Adidas, Theory and Hugo Boss,” he said. 
 
 The play will probably be profitable because apparel has some of the highest margins in retail, which will help offset the return shipping costs, he said. 
 
 Items for Prime Wardrobe include children’s, women’s and men’s clothing. 
 
 The service is similar to online shoe store Zappos, which became a success story by making buying shoes online painless with free returns and exchanges, a process that had previously been fraught with hassles. Amazon bought Zappos in 2009. 
 
 The Prime Wardrobe service is currently in beta mode, but customers are encouraged to sign up for an email notification when it launches to the general public. 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2tLBw0J ||||| On Wednesday, Amazon made its try-before-you-buy Prime Wardrobe service available to all Prime members in the U.S., expanding beyond the group of beta users who have had access to the shopping program since last June. 
 
 But one key element of the service has been removed at launch: Discounts designed to incentivize customers to keep a lot of the clothing they ordered. 
 
 When Prime Wardrobe first launched in beta last year, Amazon offered discounts of between 10 percent and 20 percent when a shopper kept three or more items. 
 
 By November, Amazon had changed the discount incentives to a flat $20 on orders of at least $200 and $50 on orders of $400 or more. 
 
 Now, those discounts are gone altogether. 
 
 An Amazon spokesperson declined to provide details on the change, but here’s my best guess at what happened: Either the discount incentives did not drive the buying behavior Amazon hoped it would, or they simply made the program economically unviable. 
 
 The Prime Wardrobe service gives customers seven days to try on a wide range of clothing — think dresses, jeans and shoes — at home before being charged for the items they want to keep. Customers have to order at least three items and no more than eight (that’s down from a maximum of 15 at the launch of the beta program and 10 in November). 
 
 While the program includes big brands like Calvin Klein and Puma, Amazon is also using it as a way to market its wide array of in-house clothing brands, which now number in the dozens. They include Lark & Ro, Daily Ritual, Goodthreads and Buttoned Down. 
 
 It will also be interesting to watch whether the program morphs over time to more closely resemble Stitch Fix, which uses a combination of technology and stylists to select items for a customer. Prime Wardrobe, on the other hand, relies on customers to select their own clothing.
– All members of Amazon Prime now have free access to Wardrobe, Amazon's fashion service that allows users to try clothes before they buy them. Until now, the service was only offered to a group of beta users. According to recode, Wardrobe-for-all comes with a downside. The site reports that Amazon has removed the discounts it previously used to incentivize people to keep the clothes they tried on. Per GMA, the online retail behemoth wants Wardrobe to mimic the in-store clothes-buying experience in much the same way as competitors such as Trunk Club or Stitch Fix. The service allows shoppers to have between three and eight items sent to their home; they are given seven days to return what they don't want, without receiving any charges until the decision to buy.