Virtual Showrooming
Intro
Buying something online hasn’t changed over the years — not only the whole purchase process but also the presentation of products has stayed strangely static. It is very rare that buyers find more than a selection of 2D photos of the products they are looking for. So far, we are pretty much stuck with the usability of a mail-order catalog when it comes to product presentations.
This is astonishing given the possibilities of today’s online world: from 3D images to fully immersive shopping experiences — the options of virtual showrooming are as plentiful as underused. In this POV we want to discuss what is possible with today’s technology, present relevant best practice cases, and draw some learnings from them.
Definition
First, let’s define what virtual showrooming is: Virtual showrooming refers to all digital solutions that allow companies to showcase, offer and sell products through online platforms. It complements or replaces physical showrooms and trade fairs and makes itself less dependent on a physical location and physical samples to present its products.
Why Virtual Showrooming is important
There are good reasons for moving on from the usability of the good old mail-order catalog for presenting products on digital media. Touching and trying out the actual product in real life is usually the first best solution for experiencing it. But where this is not possible we need to emulate real life in the digital space.
Virtual showrooming done right ensures a much more intensive customer engagement which creates deeper experiences and builds trust. It also helps with the discovery of new products: traditional e-commerce stores either sell you a product you knew you want and have searched for or require you to scroll through a wasteland of product listings to find something interesting. Virtual showrooming on the other hand can emulate the classic browsing use case that we are all very much familiar with from brick & mortar stores leading to spontaneous product discoveries. It enables you to evaluate a product way better than with any simple picture. Companies that start to use this approach now will have a clear competitive advantage and learn how to use virtual showrooming before it becomes a necessity to move on from 2D images.
But there are also reasons beyond the immediate effects on branding and sales. Virtual showrooming makes it possible to present products that aren’t even real yet, e.g. for smoke testing concepts with customers in the virtual world. Or suddenly it gets much easier to demonstrate very large products like industrial machines or wind turbines. Instead of studying schematics and PDFs, a sales representative can show a digital twin to a potential customer in VR with the flexibility of a Zoom call, but the intensity of a real visit.
This enables large cost savings e.g. by making physical prototyping or travel in many cases obsolete, which also makes the whole sales process resource-friendly and therefore more sustainable. At the same time, virtualisation makes it also possible to do way more, cheaper digital prototyping and to broaden the empirical basis for any kind of product development and innovation.
All these are good reasons why every company should ask itself how it could virtualise at least parts of the sales process.
Levels of Virtual Showrooming
Virtual Showrooming doesn’t mean that one suddenly has to move the whole online sales right into the Metaverse. Of course, it is possible to start small, grow with experience and adapt to customer needs and wishes.
We see three levels of Virtual Showrooming from optimising existing online stores and supporting new forms of interaction up to rethinking the whole selling experience:
Level 1: Product presentation
The most basic forms of virtual showrooming can be applied to the presentation of products in traditional online stores: e.g. by using 3D animations instead of 2D images, adding clickable hotspots leading to context-related product info or making product videos available. A 3D presentation of the product lets you see it from all angles, you can go close in on details and discover things you won’t see on most 2D images.
Level 2: User Interaction
Part of every real showroom is the interaction with the customer. Here traditional online stores are very much lacking. Virtual showrooming can help by adding chats as a low-barrier backchannel and combining this with live video to create an interactive experience.
Level 3: Experience
Virtual Showrooming can also mean a more holistic approach bringing product presentation and customer interactions together by replicating the experience of being in an actual showroom. This can be done with browser-based virtual worlds through which the customer navigates an avatar in a third-person view. It is also possible to build fully immersive VR-based showrooms that can exist stand-alone or as part of a larger virtual world.
The intensity of the immersion — the feeling of really being there — is what separates the different levels. Enhancing existing online storefronts doesn’t generate much immersion. A live shopping show can draw you in — depending on the host and the character of the show. The strongest sense of immersion comes with virtual worlds — especially those experienced with VR headsets like the Meta Quest 2 or the Pico Neo 3.
But the primary goal is always the same: close the gap between the physical experience and make the online product experience tangible/accessible.
How to do Virtual Showrooming in Real Life
Virtual showrooming is not only a trend of the future. It is already here. There are lots of cases where brands and companies are using aspects from all three levels to enhance the online shopping experience.
Let’s look at a couple of concrete examples of how to use different approaches to Virtual showrooming in today’s online environment:
Case 1: Integrating virtual showrooming into web stores and mobile apps
Xiaomi is one of the biggest lifestyle & gadget brands in China. It is known for mimicking the Apple brand, but its product range is much broader than computers & mobile phones. Besides cheap & simple or expensive & high-tech phones, Xiaomi also sells TV sets, smart home appliances like a smart rice cooker, and even scooters.
Like all Chinese companies, Xiaomi uses its mobile platforms extensively with live-video shows, virtual showrooms, and the like. It seems natural that they also use these tactics outside of China, experimenting with them in Western markets.
In May 2022, Xiaomi tried a Chinese-style live-streaming show with their German audience, using a text chat as a backchannel and a 3D showroom with an entire, browsable apartment featuring various smart home products. Users could watch the show introducing the different products while clicking through the virtual showroom to check them out. The products were available as movable 3D models. Some like the „Mi Robot Vacuum-Mop“ could even be tested in a virtual living room. For this Xiaomi used the Mi.com website and their native Mi mobile app. Through both channels, it was also possible to directly buy the featured products at a discounted price.
Everything was still a bit rough around the edges, and the live stream probably reached less than 10K users. But this case does show how a plain-vanilla online store can be augmented by presenting products in a more interactive way through virtual showrooming.
Case 2: Building a real Virtual Showroom and beyond
In the time of the pandemic, when car shows were rarely happening or visited, BMW created its own Brand Metaverse “JOYTOPIA” — a benchmark in the automotive industry.
It is a browser-based streamed Metaverse in Full HD that can be accessed with a computer, tablet or smartphone without further soft- or hardware needed, based on the leading technology form “Journee”, a Berlin-based startup.
The impressive surreal virtual world went online for the first time as part of the International Motor Show IAA Mobility 2021. It was used for the world premiere of the new BMW iX1, a full electric Sports Activity Vehicle.
JOYTOPIA is addressing a younger target group. The visitors can create their own avatar based on a selfie, dress it in clothes from the BMW Lifestyle collection and then dive into the world of the BMW brand. It was not only the new car that could be explored together with other visitors. There was also a lot of content around topics like electromobility, circular economy, and sustainability available — even a virtual live concert of the British rock band Coldplay. The visitors could interact and talk to each other while exploring JOYTOPIA. They also could make virtual selfies which they then shared on social media.
Already on the first day, more than 150.000 visitors from 30 countries visited JOYTOPIA. They stayed on average for 13 minutes in-world — which is pretty long compared to other communication channels. In addition, JOYTOPIA generated millions of contacts on social media.
JOYTOPIA is much more than just a virtual showroom. It is an experience space where things are possible. A space for dialogue between the BMW brand and the people, and for the people among each other. JOYTOPIA is not fully immersive because it can not (yet) be experienced with a VR headset, but it is very easily accessible with a modern web browser on all common devices.
Case 3: Build a virtual showroom in a fully immersive virtual world
Roblox is one of those multi-user online games that, through its potential to foster social experiences, turned itself into some kind of Proto-Metaverse. Users can not only play games but also meet or make friends there. Companies can use the social aspects of this platform to build virtual worlds and connect to consumers or fans on a much deeper level by providing meaningful interaction.
A company using Roblox to build relationships with its customers is Alo Yoga — a Los Angeles-based premium lifestyle brand with a mission to bring yoga to the world, spread mindful movement, inspire wellness and create community, as its marketing material states. On Roblox, Alo is trying to make good on its mission — with the Alo Sanctuary.
The Alo Sanctuary is a Roblox world with a landscape that encompasses the three earthly elements of the brand name Alo (an acronym for ‘Air Land Ocean’), all set to a meditative and soothing sound bath-style audio track. Users can discover the virtual island, play games, and perform guided meditations — online but also in real life.
The Alo world also features a virtual store with various Alo signature products: every visitor gets a yoga mat for free. Other virtual products in the store have to be earned by spending time in-world, meditating, interacting with other Alo fans, or searching for hidden orbs. So, basically, the time users spend with the brand gets rewarded with virtual fashion items, which the user’s avatar can wear — not only in the Alo Sanctuary but also in other Roblox worlds, taking the Alo brand and its message with it.
The goal right now is not to sell products. It is more about building awareness and relationships. But the concept could quickly evolve into something that connects the virtual with the real world, e.g., by giving out coupons for real products available in real stores when getting the virtual versions on Roblox.
So, the Alo Sanctuary is not yet using the full potential virtual worlds offer, but still, it is pretty successful. According to Alo so far it has piled up over 20 million visits, and over 350.000 Roblox users have worn the virtual G.O.A.T coat.
Building Digital Twins
A very advanced version of virtual showrooming is building digital twins of the real version, including an elaborate data model of your products as the single source of truth.
Such a data model should not only contain the construction, material and visualisation data. It also has to be enriched with information on other structural aspects like the product logic, and sales & marketing logic (product variations and versions, price, availability, legal restrictions, tax-related info, location, etc…).
It is a five-step process to come to the data model:
1.) Research
Research and compile all available product data
2.) Collection
Collect and store the data with specific input documentation and metadata
3.) Preparation
Streamline the data, and check for completeness, consistency, and relevance. Construct missing parts, assign materiality to parts, etc.
4.) Construction
Animation set up for moveable parts, implement product logic, connect the components
5.) Acceptance
Continuously align with specialists from different departments on the correctness of the digital twin
To handle the complex process of creation, rendering, visualisation and distribution, in an effective, efficient and scalable way, among different products, departments, countries, and use cases, a central database like the Data Hub solution from Accenture Song is strongly recommended. Otherwise, complexity explodes and automation of processes will be hardly possible.
This single source of truth helps to keep your digital twin up to date, with incremental changes on the product in order to create lean and efficient workflows and be prepared for various use cases beyond the showroom representation. This is especially crucial in industries with complex products and a myriad of variations, e.g. automotive industry with its car configurators.
In general, a digital twin approach should be chosen for every virtual showroom program which has to scale or where the frequency of product iterations is high.
It is the foundation for every visual playout of the product, be it static or moving images, for interactions in 2D or 3D, in any conceivable quality and format. There is no other way to fulfil today’s high-frequency content demand in countless channels in reasonable time and cost to create the experiences customers expect.
Summary & Perspective
After 20+ years of stagnation in how we present products online, things are finally changing. From augmenting existing e-commerce stores with videos and 3D images to building fully immersive product worlds, virtual showrooming makes it possible to turn shopping online from something efficient into something exciting.
Driving this phenomenon is not only a general trend that shifts more and more commercial activity online, e.g., because of traits we all have learned during COVID. It is also about new technologies that have become more broadly available, like WebGL, Unreal 5 engine, and ubiquitous 5G connectivity combined with more and more complex AI applications. All this combined will usher in a world of entirely new possibilities: from simple 3D representations of our world to functional simulations of real-world processes in the form of Digital Twins.
All this will become increasingly available and help brands inform potential customers much better about products, establish deeper relationships and foremost build much-needed trust.
Right now is the best time to experiment with those new possibilities while everyone is trying to figure out how to create competitive advantages with them. So, start to learn early before virtual showrooming becomes the new normal for everyone.
For further advice or support feel free to get in touch with me.
