5 Ways AR Brings Revolution in Online Retail

Augmented Reality (AR) generally refers to a live view of a visual object in your real/physical world. It superimposes a system-generated image that you can visualize in reality. For e.g., if you wish to buy some furniture online, you can simply use AR app to see it in your living area. The implementation source involves a person’s phone camera. It is becoming more of a reality progressively.

In the present scenario, AR is leaving traditional shopping practices far behind. It is offering better and engaging customer experiences. A number of renowned and forward-thinking retail brands are harnessing the power of this technology to overcome the daunting challenges with AR effectively. To mention a few, Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba have successfully integrated augmented reality (AR) with their businesses. It has seemly led them to massive profits and growth.

Below, I have tried to come up with some areas of every eCommerce business that can ease online retail to an extent if mixed with AR:

Relevant Search Results

In every online retail, offering efficient search result is the key to success. And, the major power and potential of search lie in the relevancy of search results. One of the biggest contributions of an AI-driven search for eCommerce is its ability to fetch the most relevant results.

• AI-driven search is more inclined towards keywords
• Personalizes every search ranks depending upon the user’s role & previous search behaviors.
• It also oversees the user’s search history across various channels to get the most relevant results.
• Admin can also manually optimize results based on keywords and content type.
• It offers synonym mapping of the search keyword and manages stop words (e.g., ‘why does’, ‘how to’) variations in search results.

Product Visualizations

An online shopping is always linked to an abandoned cart or product returns. It is often seen that people tend to buy some products like apparels from your store and return it after getting the delivery done. The reason being they are not able to see the actual product or how they fit on them or how the color suits them?

Whereas AR offers an in-store shopping experience to your customers, irrespective of their location. It enables them to try your products in the actual environment. With the AR apps, the persons are able to try the clothes on them and see the actual look after wearing. It helps them to make more wise purchases with fewer chances of product return.

Cognitive Search for Enterprises

AI uses a cognitive search approach that is usually based on user-driven analytics. It takes user’s search behavior, the products they watched, the pages they visited, the videos they watched etc into account. In such kind of search, an understanding of user’s past search history and intent become the key to deliver most appropriate results. It helps you to:

• keep a track of highly searched queries assuming both cases of with and without results.
• Gain better insights into user’s search history, actions that help you to predict their future preferences.

Self-Service Support

A self-service support involves an efficient and cost-effective approach towards business success. It involves carrying out multiple support task like filling up a form, providing a relevant answer to a user’s query or escalating it further to humans via chatbots etc. And, the future of self-service technology and chatbots is quite bright with the AI-driven technologies.

With an increasing trend of online buy, a major concern of large-scale enterprises is handling customer service support. Every human service support costs you a lot and you end you wasting your money. This issue is also being sorted with the advent of Augmented Reality (AR).

Nowadays, businesses can completely rely on this technology while reducing support cost and increasing case deflection. Moreover, such support is relevant and personalized for every user varying upon the user’s query or needs.

Apart from this self-service, you can also handle discount offerings on your web stores while an automatic evaluation of a particular client’s purchasing history with you. An automatic price negotiator is the future of such processes.

More Engaging Mobile Commerce

A mobile app is no more a secondary option for online retail. With the increasing number of smartphone users, online retailing is flourishing to its peaks. As AI deals with the product visualization, thus it is set to offer more promising ways to put your products in front of customers. It enables,

• Personalization, and
• Improves customer-experience.

Increased On-site Shopping Time

Nowadays, various companies offer products featuring videos and visual experience of products on user’s devices. This way a user is likely to spend more time on your website and often tend to purchase it.

With AR, an average online shopper’s spent time on your website is generally more than 3 minutes as compared to others (that implies towards higher conversions).