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360-Degree Photography and 3D Models for E-Commerce: Why both?
Augmented Reality (AR) for online retail and e-commerce is rapidly increasing in popularity, providing webshops and e-tailers a new format to enrich the product experience. AR is useful for tasks like conveying additional information about a product, projecting and fitting life-size objects into a space, or showing how the many moving parts of a piece of complex machinery might operate. What’s more, with the wider use of AR apps for shopping both in-store and online, AR is becoming more and more familiar to today’s consumers and more likely to become a significant sales driver for online retail and e-commerce.
Augmented Reality apps for online retail and e-commerce possess great potential to boost sales and improve revenue. They are also seeing an uptick in viability and investment, as major giants in the tech industry such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and others are now investing serious money into advancing AR technology.
To give you an idea:
These are just some of the many examples of investment going into Augmented Reality. Many analysts, in fact, project numbers for the AR market were somewhere between $100-130 billion in 2020.
The use cases for AR in online retail and e-commerce are numerous. Shoppers nowadays can use AR technology in-store to compare prices or learn more about products on the shelves. Then, online shoppers can use AR apps to see if, for example, furniture not only matches but also fits into their homes. They can even customize, interact with, and personalize items, virtually try on clothing, or see how items operate.
Just as with any product photography for eCommerce and online retail, ultimately, the goal is to boost conversion rates and reduce overall returns. This means delivering content that not only impresses online shoppers. The content must also provide all the vital information consumers need to be confident in making a purchase online.
This is where AR content can provide many advantages to businesses, marketing, services, and especially in online retail. AR provides webshops and e-tailers a new format to deliver more detailed and intuitive product information to shoppers. It makes the product experience more interactive and immersive overall, and this reflects well on brands and also helps to establish brand trust.
With Augmented Reality shopping apps, customers can become both content consumers and content creators. AR provides users the ability to personally interact with, customize and personalize both offline and online products.
From mobile applications to Virtual and Augmented Reality, the way shoppers are using technology in today’s world shapes how businesses must market products for online retail and e-commerce. It revolves around the shopper, and as shoppers’ demands grow, so too must brand leaders look to improve product content to meet the individual shopper’s needs.
In product marketing, this means that businesses need more than simply high-quality, visually rich product images. A shopper might want to view a product from all angles or in a deep field of zoom to check the tiniest of details before deciding if they make a purchase.
On the other hand, the shopper might want to interact with a complex or heavy item, see how it works or try it out, all without leaving their home and on the device that is most convenient to them-- whether it’s on one operating system or another, on mobile or on desktop. This is where you need to meet each user’s often-varied needs and provide them with customizable solutions for their everyday lives.
The next advantage to Augmented Reality for online retail and e-commerce is in, believe it or not, bringing new life to print product content. With companies working to bridge the gap between print and digital content, one of the main challenges is in understanding how consumers use and interact with printed content, and AR provides new advantages in this regard.
Data isn’t often or widely available for print content consumption, but by adding AR features to print advertisements and showcases, businesses can get a better understanding of their print engagement, and then continually work from there to improve how they deliver their content.
Have a look at the following list of major brands and companies now utilizing AR technology:
Another challenge to online retail and e-commerce is appealing to a global market, and, in this area, Augmented Reality can help bridge the language barrier. Language challenges can be not only time-consuming and costly for companies but also poor translations can disengage shoppers completely and leave them looking for alternative places to shop online.
This is where AR and translation software becomes an advantage. With international companies and sales especially, AR can provide valuable and accurate information in many languages across all channels, from team members down to the customer.
Things like technical demonstrations of complex products or machinery, presenting blueprints and 3D models, enhancing user manuals, or just about anything that calls for more information and needs translation for a global audience can be enriched with today’s AR technology and AR apps.
Ultimately, the goal with using 3D models and AR technology for e-commerce apps and online retail is to make shoppers feel more confident in the products, triggering purchases and reducing overall returns.
This becomes more likely to happen in today’s world if you make your product experience more interactive, informative, and tailored to the needs of the customer. This way, consumers’ curiosity is not only satisfied, but also the real product often lives up to the customer’s expectations and leads to less returns overall.
