With augmented and virtual reality development snowballing each year, the e-commerce and retail industry can benefit significantly from this trend. This article will look at the key technologies that affect the participants in the trading market.
Statista data show that the VR and AR market will increase by more than 78% over the past year. It indicates that the retail market cannot fail to respond to such technologies.
After all, these technologies can change the world of retail and e-commerce, helping sellers to sell and persuade new customers and to customers – showing new features and more information about products.
This article will look at what key augmented and virtual reality technologies are most affecting retail.
1. Virtual showrooms
Creating a virtual showcase and showroom for your product is an excellent way to attract a buyer. On such a platform, customers can immerse themselves in the store’s virtual reality and feel like they are in a regular store without leaving their homes.
Here the central technology is Lowe’s Holoroom is the best tool for visualizing a showroom.
2. POS systems convenient for e-commerce
In today’s world, it’s essential to optimize the online sales process in the e-commerce sector. Retailers want solutions that allow them to sell their products online as they sell in an offline store.
To do this, companies will need to sync e-commerce and POS terminals for their businesses. It will enable them to best integrate online and offline transactions across all locations and online stores.
3. Virtual fitting rooms
Forbes writes that global e-commerce sales are set to reach 4.2 trillion US dollars as the online surge continues. For retailers, this is a chance to use technology for themselves and create something that will help them sell goods faster—for example – virtual fitting rooms.
Augmented reality is in a unique position here, assisting shoppers in making product choices from the comfort of their homes and don’t waste time shopping offline. ARKit will enable virtual shopping on a smartphone and will be a vital part of building augmented reality apps in 2021.
4. Machine learning for demand forecasting
Understanding how customer behavior will change is vital to staying at the top of the industry. It is where machine learning helps retail and eCommerce. This technology improves automatic demand forecasting, inventory planning, customer and supplier relationship management, logistics, manufacturing, and marketing.
For example, machine learning approaches to forecasting demand are much more versatile and adaptive than traditional counterparts. In addition, since machine learning can be implemented much faster, it can better match consumer demand trends.
At the same time, it is not necessary to understand this technology on your own – you need to find someone who implements custom software development services for you.
5. Shops without staff and a cashier
Echoes of the pandemic are the desire of buyers to contact the staff in stores as little as possible.
Resellers can use RFID tags, computer vision systems, machine learning, object and face recognition devices to achieve this goal.
In the future, it will be possible to avoid contact in stores and reduce the number of touches. For example, barcodes and QR codes can be scanned using a smartphone and thus learn information about products without touching them.
6. Robots and autonomous vehicles
Previously, it seemed like a story from science fiction films, but now robots appear and help in retail. For example, some stores use robots to deliver their groceries and goods from door to door. Trucks with automatic delivery of groceries to stores are already becoming a reality.
Contactless delivery is also possible through the use of drones. At the same time, 5G technology allows drones to manage air traffic better and prevent collisions.
To sum things up
The holy grail for marketers and e-commerce companies is bringing shoppers to their stores. In both the physical and online sense, the use of virtual and augmented reality technologies holds great promise for achieving this goal. These new devices allow shoppers to dive deeper into the commerce process and give shoppers a unique appeal to visit both online and brick-and-mortar stores.
Until recently, VR and AR technologies seemed too fantastic to help in real life. However, we can already see how these deep learning platform technologies are breaking into our daily lives, and retail is one of the places where we will meet them more and more often.
You can order the development of your application or software from the software development company and get a quality product that meets the modern trends and needs of your business.
Author’s bio: Anastasiia Lastovetska is a technology writer at MLSDev, software development company that builds web & mobile app solutions from scratch. She researches the area of technology to create great content about app development, UX/UI design, tech & business consulting.