Without a doubt, if you’re not willing to advance in the at the same rate of technology now, you and/or your company will be left behind. We realize that those will embrace innovation and are willing to recreate their store fronts here going to keep good face with the customers. Immersive technology is now taking over furniture stores, and rightfully so. We’ll get back to that point, but we all know that the customers want not only the latest and best products, but the latest and best shopping experience.
According to various sources, VR will drive $122 billion in online purchases by the year 2022. The smart retailers are already looking for ways to make products available in 3D representation, using Augmented Reality to show products in foreign places, and even virtual reality to show more available products in a smaller store front, or even in a customers home.
Wayfair, IKEA, and Amazon are already using technology like this to bridge the gap between their online stores, and their actual store-fronts. This takes training time down for employees, and takes the curve difference down for the customers. Macy’s is an example of using AR to place furniture inside a customers home. This feature alone has brought brought returns down to below 2%, and sales above 65% when using the AR feature this store offers.
Macy’s first used this feature, along with being explore the whole store with VR, in three different store fronts all through the country. With how well those exceeded expectations, they moved the technology to 70 different stores, and 20 more set to launch in January of 2019.
“Since immersive technologies like VR still require some human assistance and expensive headsets most people don’t have at home, brick-and-mortar retailers have an edge to provide this type of on-site immersive shopping experiences,” Mickaël Jordan, Co-founder and COO of Augment, a company which works with most retailers in efforts to run VR. “In the meantime, the rise of the ‘endless aisle’ enabled by VR means that in the long run brick-and-mortar retailers will need to reduce the size of their stores drastically. The combination of physical and digital means much less space is required to show physical products, while a bit more space is required to provide high quality digital experiences.”
Walmart has taken initiative in the VR realm as well, but not really in the same area as most companies. Walmart is sending out over 17,000 Oculus Go headsets to their super-centers, Neighborhood Markets, and discount stores. They offer an in-depth and real training in the headset, saving on time it has to pay employees during their training. This immersive training is expected to speed up the whole process.
Already using the headset, test scores on their final floor test have gone up on an average of 15%.
“The immersiveness of well executed VR products and services creates an emotive connection between the employee and the content they are experiencing,” agrees Andy Mathis, Head of Partnerships, Oculus for Business. “We are seeing early results that when an employee feels a connection with training content through VR, they retain more of the training, and show better results, faster, in the execution of their jobs. This illustrates very real ROI.”
“VR training helps us train more associates on a large variety of topics. We have more than 45 virtual reality training modules covering areas like compliance training, new technology and soft skills,” says Michelle Malashock, Corporate Communications at Walmart.
As you can gather from those quotes, there is unlimited uses for VR in the retail industry, and all it requires to activate is an open mind and some creativity. There is untapped potential in this industry, and only some chains are starting to notice the incredibly strong effect of VR in the workplace, and AR in the customers home.
