More than 70% of people aged 16-44 know about augmented reality and its uses. Now, it’s time to leverage this technology to boost sales, marketing, promotional activities, and customer engagement.

10 Ways AR Proves To Be Revolutionary In The Retail Industry

1. Online Shopping

   Online shopping is like pre-shopping. Many people research their desired products online before they make a concrete decision to buy it. More than 60% of individuals like to shop on the Internet, nearly the same number of people use their smartphones to browse products and services on the web. This facilitates the use of AR content for majority of use cases.

   a. DIY Renovation Help

   Consider you’re working on a DIY home renovation project. You need new paint on your walls, but sample colors in the brochure don’t do justice to the actual paint and final rendering of your walls. What if you could see your walls in the new color before investing in a painting job? Yes, this is possible with AR technology! 

   With excellent visualization features of AR mobile apps, you can just point your smartphone and select any color that you’d like to see against your wall. This is a great tool for DIY enthusiasts.

   With online shopping, there’s only one drawback. You cannot presume how the furniture might look in your living room. You cannot measure what size TV would best fit on your wall or cabinet. 

   With AR, you can visualize the actual size and positioning of the furniture or appliances in your house rooms and decide if it’s a product worth purchasing! AR increases our comfort in making a purchase decision.

   b. Try What You Buy

   Customers visit stores to try different clothes and buy what fits best. Can you assure your customers that a visit to your physical store isn’t required? Yes, you can! With AR and facial recognition technology, people can try out different clothes that fancy them.

   Imagine if you could try out different shades and lipsticks in the comfort of your own house! You don’t have to visit the store or spend time waiting in huge queues for trial rooms. You get to try different products in real time, share it with friends, and compare your purchases

2. Magic Mirror

   Have you come across a magic mirror? If you haven’t, then wait a little because you’re going to see them across all major outlets and malls in the near future. They come with massive marketing opportunities for brands.

   A magic mirror allows you to try on clothes digitally and play around with different accessories. If you like what you see, you can make a direct purchase at the store in no time. It’s still work in progress but it’s worth the time

3. Exceptional Store Service

   What AR does is that it projects a virtual world onto our real world environment, offering users with exceptional interactive experience. When customers enter your store, they may see a lot of fun stuff, a lot of products to buy but the majority of spenders end up buying only what they had in mind since stepping inside the store.

   An exceptional store engages the customers with the products around them. Imagine your customers looking at a hologram of a nutritional biscuit box at your physical store, which tells them about the various nutritional values of your product.

   Consider you hold out your phone against a new clothing line in the store, you get to know the various discount options for the season, what pair of accessories to buy with it (with the click of a button), online coupons, and much more

4. Find Your Products Faster

   We can spend hours behind finding the right pair of jeans in a store. A physical store is huge to glance through every shelf at every corner. It becomes tiring to run around for hours. This is a major reason children lose their way from their parents. 

   Many shoppers face disappointment for not finding the right item in the store. Augmented reality is here to resolve this challenge. Retail companies can implement AR apps to allow customers to navigate through the store using only their smartphone. 

   The future holds many possibilities. Consider shopping at a virtual store in a public place. Customers can access these hotspots while waiting for a bus or any other public transport vehicle, and buy products on the spot and get them delivered to their doorstep.

5. Reducing Return Orders

   With the ability to try out products on the go, AR helps retailers reduce the need to replace wrong size products or disliked products. Customers can visualize any clothing item, appliance, and accessory for their own personal use.

   This approach helps customers make confident purchases that yield lesser returns on orders. In this way, you have happy and satisfied customers that will share their amazing experience with their friends, leading to more sales and purchases.

   How do you choose between Augmented and Virtual Reality?

6. Treasure Hunt To Spice Up Shopping

   If AR is going to help retailers sell new and seasonal products and services faster then how are the older stocks going to sell?

   One of the marketing goals for your team could be to drive people to older stock products or stuff that is neglected. You can make use of AR scavenger hunt across your store, by placing markers on the products that you want to sell. One who completes the hunt gets an additional discount on their products. 

   Using fun games to increase user interaction is a great way to facilitate sales and effective marketing.

7. Customization

   If you can personalize the experience of every customer, you’ll win at advertising! Advertising is about recognizing and monetizing the uniqueness of every individual.

   Formulating and implementing special discounts for customers that find you through social media channels or if a customer has been loyal to your brand for consecutive years or if a customer finds you through an AR mobile app by playing a fun game.

8. Simplify Decision Making

   Shopping is tiring, especially for someone who is picky about their choices. AR can help make quicker decisions. If you liked a particular dress, then you can simply point your phone camera at the dress and check out different color variations available for that item using an AR app.

   You can readily pay for that dress with the suitable color and order it to your address using the same app. The great thing about using AR is that you can view animations of products in 3D models rather than old 2D images that give a very vague idea of the product. 

   If you provide users with immersive experiences for the product they wish to buy, it considerably increases the probability of that user purchasing the product.

9. New Marketing Tactics

   Creating 3D models of the products in your warehouse can be a daunting task. You need to use artificial technology (AI) to automate the task of transforming your products into AR content. ImagineAR can help you build and scale your AR needs.

   ImagineAR provides AR-as-a-Service to help you with an AR platform that is packed with real-time data reporting, full branding support, cloud services to store your AR content and competitive pricing.

Why Should You Choose ImagineAR As Your Partner For AR Technologies?

The RIC Centre announced their first Digital Main Street Community Collaboration Project with us, delivering augmented reality walking tours for the Streetsville Business Improvement Area (BIA) in Mississauga in time for the holiday season.

Pam Banks, Executive Director of RIC Centre, stated that “The RIC Centre is delighted to bring technology innovators like Ready Set Go and ImagineAR together with local BIAs to strengthen the capacity of local businesses to recover from COVID-19 and thrive.”

We, at ImagineAR, have worked with leading organizations across different verticals to provide AR experiences to their customers and fans. We take care of your whole AR ecosystem and resources. 

Whether you want your customers to learn about your new products, drive traffic across a physical location, enhance your in-store experience, display promotional activities, push live events to greater heights, we got you covered!