A picture can be worth a thousand words, but itâs no guarantee that a couch will look good in your living room or that the refrigerator you like will fit properly in your kitchen.
For all their amazing attributes, eCommerce marketplaces are built on static product images â photographed for maximum desirability, but offering little by way of actual product perception.
Adding contextuality is the missing visual link, says Sravanth Aluru, founder and CEO of Avataar, which is helping ignite a revolution in visual imagery that leads to higher sales, greater customer satisfaction and fewer returns as the result of misinterpreted 2D images.
âThe best way to think about us would be a pre-purchase discovery experience for commerce, in the sense that today thereâs a significant gap between how online commerce works versus how you experience commerce in a physical store,â Aluru told PYMNTSâ Karen Webster.
Avataarâs 3D augmented reality (AR) image process renders interactive, life-size 3D models with the potential for impressive bottom-line results.
Aluru told Webster that marketplaces using the tech see conversion rates and engagement time going up as consumers use the tech for âdiscovering various different products within the context of their own home.â
Itâs also helping with returns, as consumers that buy based on better imagery are more satisfied.
âThere is an obvious impact in terms of return rates,â he said. âIf youâre choosing the product after evaluating both look and fit, the likely return rates for that category would go down.â
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Coming Soon: The AR-3D Catalog
As the pandemic progressed and eCommerce moved to the foreground over the past two years, more store-based operations sought to quickly originate sales online. Image advances are helping.
âWhat we saw was a lot of overlap in terms of digitally-influenced physical and physically-influenced digital,â Aluru said. âAt some point, technology does bring in the dynamism of the reality, which is the storefront and the digital overlay taking the entire experience to the consumerâs home.â
This led Avataar to take its visual overlay technology and adapt it to solve consumersâ issues of spatial understanding of items to purchase. Added confidence equates to higher conversions.
âFrom a merchant perspective, what really matters is the ROI in terms of transaction uplift by upgrading the 2D product catalog into life size 3D, and helping those products reach consumer homes virtually, and then help the purchase decision made after,â Aluru said. âFor us, time to value is very important because for marketplaces, scale is what matters. The real problem is photorealism at scale.
âHistorically, the problem was Hollywood CAD/CAM style manual creation of assets, which took weeks. The challenge at scale was inconsistency, because it depends on the skill of 3D artists at some level. What weâve done is come up with an end-to-end pipeline, which starts from the 2D images of a catalog that already exists.â
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100 Million âAR Shoppersâ in US Today
AR shopping online is catching on in much the same way peer-to-peer (P2P) money transfers did: a handful of consumers try it, become true believers, and word starts spreading.
Thatâs already happening, even though Aluru said itâs still early days.
âConsumers want a pre-purchase discovery thatâs more informed, and the current digital experience doesnât suffice. Theyâre also saying, âI want AR,ââ he said.
Aluru cited a Deloitte finding that there are roughly 100 million âAR shoppersâ in the U.S. right now. Per Aluru, â94% of that 100 million say, âI want AR for my next purchase.â The first time they get an experience of this new shopping, theyâre literally rendering AR as consumers.â
Avataar is still working on creating online human avatars for selling apparel and accessories that are often returned because they simply didnât look the same in person.
âWe do have tech today to be able to create human avatars, drape an outfit on it, but we still haven’t seen a solid proposition in terms of sales uplift happening,â he said. âThat needs more innovation and maturation.â
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