Gear Commerce Throws Its Hat Into VR Retail Ring

When smartphones first emerged as yet another viable medium of retail, many merchants needed help getting themselves set up on the then-foreign mobile platform. Now, a similar dynamic is emerging, but this time, it’s for virtual reality.

Gear Commerce announced on Thursday (April 14) that it had released a turnkey solution for merchants looking to start listing and selling their wares via virtual reality commerce. The suite, known as SOHO VR, includes every basic function that retailers expect — like product search and checkout support — and some that might be a bit new to them — like 3D-rendered item display and enhanced details to better suit browsing in a virtual showroom.

Ezio Magarotto, vice president of user experience design at Gear Commerce, said that this kind of support will quickly move from a luxury to a necessity as virtual reality grows alongside retailers’ abilities to harness it.

“We see that virtual reality is exploding,” Magarotto said in a statement. “In fact, we predict that vCommerce will grow to over $425 million in sales in 2016. The marketplace is demanding a way to bring eCommerce into this new virtual world. It is simply the new frontier of shoppers’ engagement with businesses and their products. That’s why Gear Commerce created SOHO VR, which offers one solution for branding your products in a VR space.”

Many large retailers have already begun work on or released their own virtual reality eCommerce suites, but as the technology grows more common among consumers and creates its own unique style of shopping habits, white-label solutions like this one from Gear Commerce should become increasingly ubiquitous as well. According to VR and eCommerce veteran Peter Wokwicz, that moment is coming sooner than most retailers think.

“It is no longer a point of contention — all major brands and any company with an established eCommerce storefront will absolutely need a virtual reality presence by the end of 2016,” Wokwicz said in the statement. “It will be imperative that you have the right expert advisors and technologies leading you in this journey, and Gear Commerce fills this need.”