Virtual Reality for Shopping: Overview
ScienceSoft has 20 year experience in software development and consulting for retail, and 27-year experience in 3D modeling.
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Virtual Reality for Shopping: The Essence
VR software for shopping is aimed at increasing customer confidence in online and on-site purchasing, reducing return rate by 60-80%, as well as enhancing customer experience and building brand loyalty.
Market Outline: Virtual Reality in Retail and Marketing
The implementation of virtual reality in retail and marketing is forecasted to bring $5.4 billion by 2028, from $2 Million in 2021, at a CAGR of 13.82%. The driving force behind VR adoption in these sectors is an increasing demand for sophisticated and personalized customer experience and the need for new ways of brand differentiation.
How Virtual Reality for Shopping Works
VR system architecture
Use cases
Customers explore 3D-modeled products in different VR settings, from lifelike stores to fantasy worlds or product-specific scenarios (e.g., furnishing a virtual room or test-driving a car). Such showrooms can be available either remotely for online shopping or at a brick-and-mortar store to enhance conventional shopping with new “try it before you buy it” possibilities.
Brand promotional activities
To engage customers with the brand emotionally and promote loyalty – for example, through VR storytelling (e.g., showing the stages of crafting a product or telling the story behind the brand) or VR “live events” (e.g., a virtual fashion show).
Category management
For planning merchandising flows, store layouts and planograms. It saves time and money on physical prototypes of in-store executions and allows creating multiple options to validate the best ones only.
Customer research
Conducting customer research in a simulated store replica to examine what attracts customers’ attention and what doesn’t. Such research gives objective, data-rich results for tailoring marketing and category management strategies.
Features
Retailer-side features:
Store editor
With SKU catalogs, store layouts and planogram templates, a user can shape the VR environment starting from the overall navigation of the store to planning a particular shelf. The tool allows changing store lightning, placement of different items, and product metadata.
Advanced customer analytics
With the help of eye-tracking devices, VR software collects valuable data on the in-store customer journey, including their navigation paths, eye tracking heatmaps and gaze plots.
Personalized recommendations
Based on the customer behavior analysis, the system can suggest ideas of product matches or other products a customer may like.
Customer-side features:
Product exploration
- Metadata check-up. Tapping a product, a customer gets a pop-up with information about it. Metadata can range from purely technical (price, sizes, contents) to “branded” (e.g., food recipes or stylist tips for clothing items).
- Customization. A customer can change available configurations of the product (color/pattern, additional features, etc.).
Integration with payment services
A customer can authenticate their bank account details to order products right in the VR store.
Examples of VR Apps for Shopping
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Amazon installed VR kiosks across India’s shopping malls dedicated to promoting their Prime membership before the Prime Day sales event. Visitors could take a virtual hot air balloon flight to an imaginary Amazon city and explore Prime Day products featured in different thematic spaces (e.g., a futuristic fashion shop with clothing, a kid’s room with toys, a refrigerator with groceries). |
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Ikea launched the VR app Immerse in several of their German stores that allows customers to design a kitchen or a living room to their liking: choose materials and colors of the furniture, add interior details, and explore the room in different lighting settings. These custom designs can be saved and shared across social media, which helps natively increase the brand’s outreach. |
General Technology Stack
Challenges of Virtual Reality for Shopping and Solutions
Challenge #1
A retailer’s offer contains a large and constantly growing number of products, so “manual” digitalization of all the needed SKUs into 3D models for a VR store would be too time-consuming and costly.
Challenge #2
To make a brain believe a virtual store is “real”, a VR app should reproduce background noises typical for a physical store: piped music, steps, distant chatter, etc. However, stereo systems commonly used in VR only convey whether the sound is on the left or right, whereas it should come from multiple directions.
Cost Drivers of Virtual Reality for Shopping
The cost of virtual reality software for shopping starts at $150,000 and largely depends on a VR idea you want to turn into reality. If we detail the main cost drivers, these will be:
Core cost drivers
- Content (number of 3D models optimized for VR) and software to render it.
- Complexity of customer experience in VR.
- Number of user roles.
- The depth of VR testing.
Additional cost drivers
- VR hardware.
- Development of a customer data analytics module and its integration with a VR app.
- Implementation of spatial audio technology.
- Integration with Product Information Management (PIM).
- VR store maintenance (updating the content).
Operational costs
- Cloud services (based on the volume of cloud resources demanded).
VR for Shopping: Consulting and Development by ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft knows the particulars of VR development and combines them with 20-year experience in retail IT to create high-end VR experiences for shopping.
VR for shopping: consulting
Our consultants:
- Help decide on the VR system’s functionality.
- Choose the right tech stack.
- Design a scalable architecture.
- Define VR development and management roadmap.
- Estimate TCO and ROI of the VR system.
VR for shopping: development
The service covers all the stages of VR system creation:
- Business analysis and research.
- Software architecture design.
- UX and UI design.
- 3D modeling,
- VR development and testing.
- Continuous support and evolution, if requested.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is an international software development and IT consulting provider working since 1989. We use our industry-specific knowledge and experience in novel technology to build viable VR software for retail. To learn more, check out our VR development offer or get in touch with us directly.