Augmented Reality or AR technology has come a long way over the past decade, helping businesses across the e-commerce spectrum to better their business prospects. From allowing people to try on clothes in virtual showrooms to enabling brands to place products inside photographs, AR can really help enhance sales in a major way.
This is especially true of certain categories of business-like furniture retail, home décor, fashion, accessories and so on. That is because AR technology enables prospects and customers to see what a certain product looks like in a particular setting. The digital age that we live in provides customers with a great deal of choice and in such a scenario the deployment of AR allows e-commerce businesses to use ever-new ways of showcasing their products to potential customers about to make an online purchase.
Apart from the fact that sales improve on account of using AR to exhibit the best features of one’s products, there is also better customer satisfaction because of a lower incidence of returns.

Let us look into how augmented realty helps enhance e-commerce sales in a little more detail-

1. Better highlighting of product information

The biggest handicap faced by e-commerce stores is an inability to properly showcase products. According to reports, as much as 27% product returns are on account of them not being as per description. Using AR to demonstrate product features makes prospects taker keener interest in them, enhancing the probability of their buying the product.

2. Enhanced engagement

It has been conclusively been demonstrated that using AR via apps helps enhance customer engagement. A good example of this is Ikea’s Place app that enables customers to position pieces of furniture into their own photographs to see how these look from an aesthetic point of view.

3. Better conversion rates

There is solid evidence to suggest that deploying AR helps brands to substantially increase conversion rates amongst people who are open to using the technology themselves. Shopify, for instance has reported a 94% to 205% increase in conversion since it implemented AR.

Conclusion

The growing significance that the e-commerce industry attaches to AR can be judged by the fact that some of the best-known brands like L’Oreal, Ikea and CB2 have used it enhance both customer experience and sales with great success. It is not surprising that AR is increasingly being deployed by even small brands owing to its ability to give a huge boost to the online sales of one’s products