Field notes on AI guided selling.

Augmented reality is becoming far more than a fun toy. Today, augmented reality is an invaluable tool for businesses. High-quality 3D visuals have seen a growing demand in eCommerce for at least the past decade but the pandemic caused consumer expectations to spike and they’re here to stay. During quarantine, shoppers were forced to do nearly all of their browsing and buying from home. Brands stepped up to provide them with highly detailed, photorealistic 3D product visuals raising the bar for every player in the digital marketing game. Some brands went a step further and designed augmented reality experiences enabling customers to view products in their spaces in real-time. Today, the competition is a short keyword search away and consumers have voiced their preference for brands offering AR for ecommerce. In fact, a recent study found that 66% of shoppers said augmented reality increased their confidence that they were buying the right product. So it’s clear that augmented reality can increase customer confidence, and therefore boost sales, but how can businesses go about designing and deploying an augmented reality solution? Fortunately, with rising demand has come new opportunities to incorporate augmented reality into your marketing plan. There are multiple avenues to that end of varying levels of complexity. Let’s take a look at a few options.

Consumers today are craving highly visual online shopping experiences. Showcasing products in real-life environments via augmented reality (AR) certainly seems like it would meet that criteria. But is AR an effective tool for eCommerce? We’ve all seen AR apps used to share fun, whimsical animations with friends and family but AR has far more potential than a few laughs. Think about it. With high-quality 3D visuals, AR gives consumers a chance to envision real, tangible products right in their own space. This gives them even more confidence than being able to browse a store’s physical inventory at a brick-and-mortar location.

In digital marketing, Augmented Reality (AR) has been all the rage for quite some time now, and for good reason. But what’s the best AR app for eCommerce? There are plenty of variables to take into consideration when rating the AR apps available to digital marketers but before we dive in, let’s take a look at what AR is and why it’s so critical for eCommerce today.

There’s a movement happening in the building supply industry where personalization and customization are over taking mass production and manufacturers are left with juggling greater product complexity. But companies are learning to evolve and adapt. There are two solutions that help B2B and D2C companies face operational and sales challenges to advance ahead, quicker.

This post is part of our Threekit Webinar Series, a blog series where we recount the most pertinent takeaways from the Threekit insiders and guest experts who are thought leaders in the 3D and augmented reality space. With more and more consumers doing the bulk of their shopping online, consumers are seeking additional confidence when making decisions. Providing immersive, user-friendly, interactive 3D experiences helps show them exactly what they’ll be purchasing while making them feel more in control. Threekit and inRiver have teamed up to provide eCommerce brands with those 3D and augmented reality (AR) experiences to increase online sales. In a recent conversation, Hilary Murdock, Lead Product Marketer at Threekit and Scott Bears, a Senior Sales Engineer at inRiver explained how they’re making that happen. The following is a summary of what they covered.

Frustrated by low conversion rates on your eCommerce store? Augmented reality (AR) can help you increase online sales significantly. According to Shopify’s data, the conversion rate of products with AR content is 94% higher than products without AR. This is why brands should use Shopify augmented reality. It exploits advanced graphics and visual effects to bring images to life, visualize products in shoppers' real surroundings, and enhance the customer experience.

Today we’re announcing Threekit 3D and AR is live on the commercetools Apps Marketplace. This partnership enables all commercetools merchants to easily access the power of 3D and AR for their entire product catalogue.

The use of Augmented Reality (AR) and the 3D visualization has shown an immense increase in the past year. Today, businesses are using these technologies to display their products on eCommerce sites as well as for marketing to consumers at large.

3D and Augmented Reality (AR) appear to be shifting the advertising landscape already. Just how significantly will only become clear in the upcoming months and years, however huge businesses are already using it to great effect, understanding that now is the time to deploy this comparatively new technology to produce new experiences for customers.