November 15, 2023
Immersive technologies are becoming the new staples of ecommerce services. Itransition helps forward-thinking retailers incorporate extended reality into their shopping solutions to create memorable customer experiences and increase engagement, brand loyalty, and conversions.
expected global virtual reality in retail market size by 2028
Valuates Reports
of VR users tested products/browsed stores via VR before making a purchase
PwC
are interested in immersive shopping experiences in the next 5 years
McKinsey
Virtual reality stores are equipped with essential AR/VR-specific features to enable enhanced customer experiences and better engagement.
The store editing tool enables users to modify virtual stores, from the entire shopping environment to placing new products on a particular shelf.
A retailer’s sales staff can proactively engage with shoppers during online store browsing, delivering the same level of personalized, one-on-one experiences and support that customers can enjoy in stores.
Capitalizing on human competitiveness and a sense of accomplishment, ecommerce companies can incorporate game elements into their shopping ecosystem to stimulate more interactions, foster customer loyalty, and build trust.
By tapping a product, customers can get detailed information about it and look over different product parameters.
With high-quality images and videos, retailers can showcase their products in detail so that customers can explore them before buying.
Retailers can track VR-specific metrics to better understand customers’ interests and behavior based on their interactions, movements, and vision.
Retailers use virtual reality to deliver different degrees of immersion and interaction with customers in their virtual stores.
By making online products “tangible,” brands enhance and improve buyer confidence and, in turn, reduce returns. Customers are more likely to click "add to cart," resulting in an increase in purchases.
Jay Soni
Marketing Director at Yorkshire Fabric Shop
Our experts help businesses in the retail industry on their way to AR/VR adoption and provide ecommerce consulting services for existing virtual stores.
AiBUY, the owner of a shoppable video platform, teamed up with Itransition to make their solution more interactive. The platform enables buyers to purchase items right from the videos they are watching and lets sellers embed links to their store or products into any video or image. Driven by machine learning algorithms, the solution automatically recognizes items among 1.5 million images and recommends the closest matching products, delivering exclusive omnichannel experiences for customers and increasing visibility and conversion rates for brands.
By integrating virtual stores with their ecommerce sites, businesses can synchronize product catalogs, prices, and item availability information between the two systems and automatically add 3D images to corresponding SKUs.
Predictive analytics tools help retailers obtain valuable insights to deliver unique experiences for every customer, predict demand, and understand future shopping trends when planning merchandising to better reach the target audience.
Retailers can integrate AI-powered chatbots into their virtual stores to provide customers with virtual assistants that can give accurate, human-like answers to text or voice questions, recommend relevant products, and support customers during virtual shopping.
To make customers feel truly connected to the brand, virtual stores can be equipped with video calling apps for real-time video chats with sales associates during shopping. Customers can revisit those call recordings to get tips shared during the consultation.
With remote payment solutions, retailers can send customers a secure link with the amount payable and the purchase description via the in-app chat, email, SMS, or messaging apps.
AR/VR technologies provide customers with an engaging and interactive experience, resulting in a memorable encounter, a happy sale, and increased possibilities of customers returning.
Bram Jansen
Chief Editor of vpnAlert
Augmented reality overlays real-time digital content on top of real-world environments and objects captured with the user’s mobile camera. The AR software uses depth tracking and computer vision to analyze the video stream as well as recognize and enhance objects.
Virtual reality allows retailers to create computer-simulated shopping environments that replace users’ real-world spaces as they put on VR headsets. The technology can track users’ body motions to provide 360-degree immersive experiences.
WebAR delivers augmented shopping experiences via the mobile web browser and doesn’t require installing a dedicated application. Instead, users can access WebAR content simply by scanning a QR code or tapping on a web link, which makes the virtual buying journey easy and seamless.
Serving as the foundation of AR/VR experiences, three-dimensional digital models represent physical objects, such as products and customers’ bodies, that users can interact with virtually.
Self-learning ML algorithms can process vast amounts of customer data to provide relevant product recommendations, personalize buying experiences based on previous shopping behavior, and ensure realistic conversations with chatbots and virtual assistants.
Computer vision allows real-time recognition and tracking of real-world objects to adapt AR/VR store experiences to the user’s environments and movements.
Defined as “the envisioned future iteration of the internet made up of 3D virtual spaces linked within a perceived virtual universe” by McKinsey, the metaverse will provide retailers with additional customer touchpoints along the buying journey and new, previously inaccessible ways to engage with customers, drive conversions, and increase customer loyalty.
of US adults have joined or are considering joining the metaverse
Statista
of global executives believe interacting with customers in the metaverse will become commonplace
Shopify/Ipsos
the global metaverse market size in 2022, set to grow at a CAGR of 41.6% to 2030
Grand View Research
Our data indicates that the majority of younger consumers want to be able to shop their favorite brands anywhere they go online, including on metaverse platforms. These shoppers have grown up with online videogames, esports and social media and many of them see the emerging metaverse as a modern-day mall—a connected virtual world where they can hang out, shop and socialize. For retail brands, these survey findings highlight the importance of creating sound metaverse commerce strategies today that will resonate with consumers over the coming years.
Neha Singh
CEO of Obsess
by generation, hours per day
Scheme title: Expectations of time spent in metaverse in 5 years
Data source: mckinsey.com — Probing reality and myth in the metaverse, 2022
By creating virtual stores, retailers can gain a competitive advantage and future-proof their brand while unlocking multiple business benefits.
By enabling customers to see how products look on them or in their homes, companies can drive more sales.
With captivating hands-on experiences provided by virtual stores, retailers can increase engagement and establish meaningful emotional connections with their customers.
Virtual stores enable companies to conduct marketing research and test different store layouts and concepts using significantly fewer resources.
Virtual stores enable retailers to analyze customer shopping behavior in detail and create highly personalized interactive experiences.
Since customers can explore and visualize products in almost natural settings, they feel more confident in their purchase decisions and are less likely to return items.
Still being a novel concept, virtual stores and the catchy user experiences they create generate word-of-mouth marketing for a brand and differentiate it from competitors.
Retailers can train new hires in a safe environment of virtual stores, minimizing the risk of costly mistakes and speeding up onboarding.
Virtual stores enable customers to shop anywhere by exploring virtual replicas of brick-and-mortar stores or branded virtual worlds.
Barrier
Virtual stores can perform poorly if the internet connection is too weak.
Barrier
Solution
Heavy 3D models should be optimized by reducing the number of model planes while presenting a realistic product illustration to ensure that extended reality stores load fast, particularly on mobile devices.
Barrier
Virtual objects can look unrealistic in real-world settings on a mobile screen.
Barrier
Solution
Developers should apply a depth-from-motion approach when building an AR app to create true-to-life occlusions for virtual objects. In this case, no additional sensors are required on mobile devices.
Barrier
Since immersive technologies are still relatively new, some customers can have concerns about the new type of shopping or the lack of special equipment that can prevent them from visiting virtual stores.
Barrier
Solution
Businesses can initiate informational marketing campaigns to highlight all the possible benefits of shopping in the VR environment for customers. To handle the problem of costly head-mounted displays, brands can instruct customers on device rental opportunities. However, companies opting for AR experiences only need to raise awareness about their virtual shopping app because no additional hardware is required for it to function.
Whether with a partial AR or fully virtual VR immersion, virtual stores provide a more natural shopping experience and can significantly improve customer engagement and brand reputation, enable hyper-personalization, and allow for advanced marketing and research activities. While today some retailers may hesitate to invest in innovative technology, virtual shopping is highly likely to be the future of retail. At Itransition, we advise companies to start exploring virtual shopping opportunities as early as possible, and we can help retailers launch immersive virtual stores to delight customers and outperform competitors.