Virtual reality has been around since the 1990s, but it’s only recently that we’ve seen its revolutionary potential for various industries. One of these industries is e-commerce. E-commerce is a projected $4.89 trillion industry in 2021, with virtual reality technology continuing its growth exponentially.
Allowing consumers away into your store without ever leaving their homes will be game-changing for marketers and business owners alike! With advancements in technology over the next five years, such as mobile-ready virtual reality experiences and augmented in-store experiences, e-commerce is set to be impacted heavily by virtual reality.
But what could the implications be for marketing and advertising? How will this affect brick and mortar stores? In what ways can businesses use VR to increase revenue and customer engagement? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this blog post.
So let’s explore how this revolutionary new technology could affect e-commerce stores and their marketing strategies!
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Let’s Get Started with Virtual Reality
To truly appreciate the impact of virtual reality (VR) on e-commerce stores, we must first understand VR itself.
Virtual reality (VR) is a technology that lets you interact with virtual worlds. These virtual worlds could be either computer-generated or created through video footage of real-world environments, providing viewers a virtual space in which they can explore and interact with objects.
VR headsets have also been designed to simulate depth perception and 3D environments using unique stereoscopic displays, head tracking, and 360-degree movement tracking sensors.
The main thing to remember about virtual reality technology is its level of immersion ― it completely immerses the user into an artificial environment. Users wear VR headsets to observe this virtual reality as if they were there ― for example, viewing life-size images on virtual screens around them or interacting with virtual avatars.
This artificial environment simulates a physical presence in the real world or an imagined world. Cyberspace, virtual worlds, artificial reality, immersive multimedia, and interactive multimedia all refer to the same virtual existence.
Now let’s discuss how e-commerce stores use this technology to make the user’s shopping experience unforgettable.
VR Applications for E-commerce Stores
Virtual Reality Apps can be a great value addition to online businesses selling products or services. For an e-commerce business, VR provides an excellent platform for creating customer experiences. You can build applications that help customers feel and interact within the virtual world.
Here is a list of top virtual reality apps that e-commerce companies are utilizing in 2021.
Virtual Showroom And Product Tours
Ask yourself this: What makes some users prefer physical stores over online ones? More often than not, the answer would be the ability to touch, feel and experience the product to satisfy curiosity.
Product pictures and descriptions just don’t cut it for users anymore. That’s because consumers decide to buy products online or from physical stores on how they perceive the product’s look and feel. They want to see the development in action and this physical demonstration attracts them more than anything else.
Virtual reality allows you to give them a virtual tour of your actual showroom or virtual office. Users can also take a virtual tour of what it would look like to use the product in real life. These virtual reality apps and tools allow e-commerce stores to immerse users in virtual worlds designed for specific applications.
Take Audi’s Oculus Rift Headset as an example. Audi used virtual reality headsets to provide users with a completely immersive experience while buying an Audi from the showroom. Users would customize paint, exterior, interior, and body kit according to their liking to see how the car would look in real life.
As a result, Audi made more sales because users were able to get a more immersive experience for the car. A true win-win situation!
Virtual Training and Coaching
With virtual reality, trainers have an opportunity to deliver training programs, lessons, and coaching sessions like never before. VR offers interesting new ways that enable both students and on-job employees to experience their respective fields inside out before they even enter the real world.
Businesses can now conduct live demos to expose trainees to almost real-life scenarios to aid them in learning and give insight into management. Thanks to the VR headsets, employees and trainees experience realistic sounds and sights as they would during the job.
The VR experience also allows trainees to perform movements and react to different scenarios. Such features are exceptional for training emergency workers, pilots, or ship captains. When it comes to e-commerce stores, VR training helps store employees experience the headsets for themselves to help users when the time comes.
In addition, e-commerce stores can also orient their employees with specialized products with the help of virtual reality. Since some products require technical knowledge, experiencing the effects is imperative in understanding how to sell them. That’s where VR training comes in handy.
Virtual Events for Community Building
Live events are a big part of community building, and e-commerce stores rely on community building to gather a consumer base. Thanks to virtual events, e-commerce stores are still able to host community-building events amid COVID-19. With lockdown restrictions in effect for most of 2020 and continuing in 2021 in some countries, the ability to host live events virtually helps e-commerce businesses keep their following.
Reasons to Adopt VR for E-commerce
Consumers Expect It
A survey showed that 64% of consumers want VR for shopping. Traditional methods are outdated, and retailers have no choice but to adopt new technologies or perish. That’s because technologies like VR provide users with an overall better experience and complements the modern lifestyle.
Since modern users are accustomed to sophistication and convenience, virtual reality is one of the trends that appeals the most to them. This preference in and of itself is a significant reason for e-commerce stores to adopt VR.
It Appeals to Younger Audience
The virtual reality revolution has already begun with the youngsters who are early adopters of virtual reality kits such as Google Cardboard, Samsung VR, Google Daydream View, and Nintendo virtual reality console.
A custom virtual shopping app can provide an immersive experience that is quite attractive for a generation used to interacting in virtual worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft.
Product Visualization
Virtual reality allows business owners to design, create and customize products before they hit the market. An architect can present clients with a virtual walkthrough of an upcoming building in real-time to see for themselves how it will look like and even get a feel of the atmosphere from their prospective locations within the digital 3-D world.
Marketing For Higher Sales
Thanks to the recent advancements in virtual reality, some sectors have found new ways to grow their sales. For instance, car manufacturers are using VR technology as an advertising medium because customers can now virtually view different parts of vehicles such as engines or interiors by just using a VR headset or mobile phone rather than taking a test drive.
Boosting Customer Engagement
Since virtual reality has gained acceptance within the general public, businesses utilize it as a customer engagement measure. This utilization is due to its capability of making them feel like they are present among other customers during an event or with a brand representative in a virtual conference room.
This is more suited for businesses that want to create awareness about new products or services before officially launching them to experience what they have ordered (in the case of customers) or how their clients will respond to it once introduced (for service providers).
Roadblocks to VR Adoption
Although virtual reality is likely to impact e-commerce in the future positively, it might take some time for VR to pick up momentum. This delay is due to its high price point, the availability of virtual reality content, lack of awareness about virtual reality, and issues with virtual reality devices such as comfort levels, video game needs, and motion sickness.
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The Future of Ecommerce with Virtual Reality
The concept of virtual reality is not new. With the first attempts in the 1970s, people became increasingly aware of how realistic special effects are with computer-generated graphics. Although these initial versions were still very rudimentary, they opened up entirely new possibilities for artistic expression and entertainment purposes.
The virtual world created for the movie Tron, using computer graphics and 3D animation, was an impressive piece of work back in 1982.
In 2015 the virtual reality market experienced a genuine boom, with virtual products gaining momentum. For example, immersive virtual experiences and videos have been made available on major platforms like YouTube and Facebook.
Virtual shopping malls are already making their debut online and enabling customers to virtually experience merchandise before they purchase anything—a sort of hybrid between two-dimensional internet browsing and traditional shopping habits.
In 2021, virtual reality is used by over 60% of shoppers in the United States for product discovery and research purposes. This means an unprecedented opportunity for businesses and marketers to redefine the customer experience from a new perspective.
Virtual reality will also become more accessible, with cheaper hardware options being introduced at a faster rate than ever before – this leads us to believe that VR user numbers could reach as high as 1 billion people worldwide by 2023. That’s why e-commerce stores need to adopt this technology as soon as possible to make the most of the coming trend.
If you want your business to stay ahead of the curve, you must begin experimenting with VR and get ready to take the lead!