It is widely known that presentation is everything, especially when it comes to retail marketing. That is why brands are now using virtual showrooms to showcase their products, providing customers with a fully immersive experience.
Virtual showrooms are interactive spaces that either replicate the offline stores or are new digital showrooms created to allow customers to shop in an offline-like environment. The aesthetics of the virtual showroom can be inspired by the existing physical showroom or an entirely different concept.
The virtual showroom technology allows a brand to enhance its online space by promoting its products through high-resolution graphics and an interactive and user-friendly interface. Customers can move through a virtual space, click on a specific product to reveal its information and see it in 3D, and consult with a sales representative via the chat function. Then, they can complete the purchase order on the same platform.
Various brands of varying sizes, styles, and prices are now offering a virtual experience. The Parisian luxury house — Balmain announced the opening of a virtual showroom last year, featuring the new collection with a 3D avatar of the house’s designer, Olivier Rousteing, that will guide the visitors around the virtual journey.
Another recent virtual showroom launch comes from Neiman Marcus that has partnered with Hypebeast, the digital media platform, to promote exclusive footwear from 11 luxury brands. The digitally recreated retail floor was inspired by a futuristic laboratory crossed with a contemporary art gallery exhibit. Every style is displayed with accentuating lighting and compositional angles within the clean and minimal CGI environment. Customers can enter the space and explore every pair with interactive navigation and shoppable annotations explaining the sneakers’ unique design details.
The Key Differentiator Over the Somewhat Mundane E-commerce Platform
Virtual showrooms go well beyond e-commerce catalogues, transforming online shopping into a visually engaging, inspiring, and life-like experience on the screen. At a brand level, it is a great platform to connect and develop relationships with online customers at an emotive level. These photorealistic virtual showrooms are designed to drive discovery, engagement, click-through, session duration, and conversion for leading retailers and brands.
Immersive shopping experiences are becoming a standard part of e-commerce. And retailers are leveraging virtual reality to provide shoppers with a rich, interactive way to shop for their products.
Younger shoppers who have grown up interacting with video games and watching e-sports expect to be able to interact with brands in real-time as they shop online, and 3D virtual shopping experiences will soon be ‘table stakes’ for brands in every retail category.
Silversea Media Group’s Immersive Virtual Showroom Solution doesn’t just improve the potential of e-commerce. It can also be used to increase foot traffic in the real world, as consumers make the trip to brick-and-mortar stores to investigate products they’ve noticed online.
Start exploring what Silversea Media Group could do for your brand. Click here to learn more about virtual showrooms.
