Category: Blog

For years, omnichannel has been about logistics. Retailers’ focus with their omnichannel strategies was to enable seamless availability of inventory across brick-and-mortar and digital channels. Omnichannel technologies focused on showing store availability of individual products on e-commerce sites, enabling BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store), and making products available on new digital channels such as Instagram Shopping.  

Retailers are now shifting to focus on omnichannel experience – i.e. how customers experience their brand across different channels. The brand experience today is very disparate across the brick-and-mortar and digital channels. The primary brand manifestation channels were stores, events and fashion shows. Whereas the online experience lacks in comparison with every brand represented as just a grid of thumbnails in a database format on e-commerce sites. Retailers are now looking to bring that immersive brand experience from in-store to online. Once logistics are solved, experience is the next frontier of omnichannel.

Online shopping will become an experience with e-commerce sites offering a branded and discovery-driven shopping interface. A brand’s online presence will no longer be limited to a monotonous database grid of items. The new engaging experiential e-commerce will mirror the brand immersiveness of an in-store experience and bring together the best of online and offline channels in the form of virtual stores. 

When the beauty brand NARS embraced omnichannel experience with their first virtual flagship store, Barbara Calcagni, President of NARS said, “NARS is known for our immersive boutiques across the world, but over the past year, we’ve seen a significant business shift towards e-commerce, and we recognize an opportunity to enhance the consumer experience. The new virtual flagship brings together innovative digital tools and the special NARS world to life, enabling us to engage our consumers in an even more impactful way”.

What is Omnichannel Experience?

Omnichannel experience is a marketing strategy that allows a retailer to communicate an immersive brand message to its consumers. The goal here is to develop a consistent customer experience spread across offline and online channels. When this is achieved, an omnichannel strategy leads to complete alignment of all channels, boosting not only consumer interaction, but also the brand’s image and identity.

A big part of an omnichannel strategy is creating a digital shopping experience that increases brand recall and makes buying a product enjoyable. The focus here moves towards ensuring high customer engagement. A successful omnichannel experience strategy with a consistent brand image across a multitude of channels is necessary for a brand to stay competitive in today’s landscape. 

What is the virtual selling channel?

Virtual selling will play a significant role in the next frontier of omnichannel. This new channel will be vital in enabling engaging, interactive experiences in online shopping. 

Virtual selling is a combination of technologies, such as virtual stores, sales live chat platforms, and livestream video shopping that all allow brands to foster a more authentic and meaningful connection with consumers. Forward-thinking brands have already built new teams that will strategize, manage, and optimize this new virtual selling channel and be responsible for all these new technologies collectively. 

Digital shopping will become an experience in which the consumer is given the power to navigate their own journey. “Digital engagement is moving from passive to active creation—shifting creative power to the user,” according to the Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report Into the Metaverse. Today leading brands are offering consumers this empowering, interactive shopping experience through virtual stores – a new sales channel in a brand’s omnichannel mix.

What are the benefits of leveraging virtual stores for an omnichannel strategy?

According to Vogue Business, “One of the most significant omnichannel evolutions that will continue into 2022 is a focus on digitizing the high-touch experience once only possible in stores”. 

A virtual store provides the perfect platform for digitizing the immersive experience previously achievable only in a physical store. Virtual stores are at the forefront of experiential e-commerce and are an entry point into the metaverse. They put a customer in a 3D version of the in-store shopping experience, filled with advanced services and experiences.

The virtual space can emulate a brick-and-mortar store and capture the brand’s identity in a photorealistic 3D virtual store. “Authenticity and interactivity are also vital in virtual spaces” according to Vogue Business. This new virtual shopping format can also be entirely digitally rendered in 3D using CGI, enabling brands to set up a creative concept store or a fantastical location. Customization of a virtual store allows brands to create unique, creative, and engaging experiences on their e-commerce websites, while communicating an authentic brand image.

For example, in Salvatore Ferragamo’s “House of Gifts” virtual store, customers are brought to a gorgeous villa showcasing the Italian heritage of Ferragamo, a key part to the brand’s identity. The “House of Gifts”, a unique, custom 3D-rendered experience, is designed to convey this heritage. Virtual stores offer highly interactive elements that enhance user engagement such as digital avatars, augmented reality try-on, quizzes and gamification. 

Virtual stores will be at the core of a competitive omnichannel strategy focused on experience.

How to get started?

You can begin setting up your virtual selling channel with Obsess. Obsess is an Experiential E-commerce Platform enabling brands and retailers globally to offer immersive 3D virtual shopping experiences. Obsess creates photorealistic and 3D-rendered virtual stores that serve as an entry point into the metaverse. Virtual stores powered by Obsess can be marketed in a variety of ways including social media channels, mobile apps, websites, and QR codes. A virtual store is a proven marketing and sales tool today that forms the basis of your virtual selling channel.  

Developing an omnichannel experience strategy to move beyond omnichannel logistics which are table stakes now, is key for any brand looking to stay relevant. An effective and efficient strategy allows for a brand to be more authentic to its values, while beating competition with a phenomenal interactive user experience. Virtual stores bring the inspiration and discovery experience of offline shopping into online, and open the door to a new marketing channel for retailers and brands. Learn how to start your omnichannel experience journey today and create your own virtual store.

What is the Metaverse?

The term “metaverse” originally appeared in Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel Snow Crash. Three decades later, the term metaverse is losing its association with science fiction and becoming a reality now. Google Analytics shows interest in the metaverse has accelerated at a rapid rate with the number of searches for the word increasing more than tenfold from 2020 to 2021. Vogue Business states the metaverse is “the next stage of how we use technology—the successor of the internet age”. 

With all the heightened interest in the metaverse, there have been differing definitions of the term. The Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report “Into the Metaverse” highlights the ambiguity around the term, “Some call it the new internet, others a democratized virtual society, yet others the convergence of virtual and physical realities, persistent virtual spaces, or a digital twin of our own world.” Matthew Ball, a Venture Capitalist, Managing Partner at early-stage venture fund EpyllionCo, tries to create clarity around the term commenting, “The best way to understand the metaverse is to think about the idea that we will spend an ever-increasing amount of our lives connected to persistent virtual simulations.”

“The Metaverse is the New Mall” defines the metaverse “as a connected, 3D virtual world where consumers, through their individual avatars, are able to interact in real time with the digital environment and everything and everyone in it. In this virtual universe, users participate in activities like shopping, gaming, learning, working, and attending concerts and events—but they also use the space to just hang out and socialize with one another.”

According to Vogue Business, the metaverse comprises “digital fashion, social media, augmented reality, virtual stores, video games, and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)”. Many brands and retailers had already begun exploring these areas of the metaverse before interest in the term started to peak after the advent of Facebook’s Meta.

Brands will have an unprecedented opportunity to create in the metaverse. In the metaverse, brands can design their own environments devoted to shopping that will allow consumers to go beyond the simple transaction of searching and filtering. Shoppers will be able to interact with one another and with brands and their products. The metaverse will empower consumers to design, clothe and accessorize their digital avatars, attend fashion shows, and participate in other activities and events. According to a Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report Into the Metaverse, “Digital engagement is moving from passive consumption to active creation–shifting creative power to the user.” Brands need to begin defining how they will represent themselves in the metaverse because shoppers, especially younger demographics, will expect to seamlessly engage with every aspect of their online lives through the virtual world we will inhabit. 

Why is Interest in the Metaverse at an All-Time High?

There are a handful of reasons why retailers and brands should begin positioning themselves for the metaverse, a market opportunity that Bloomberg Intelligence estimates will reach nearly $800 billion by 2024.  

Facebook’s rebrand as Meta underscores how timely it is for brands to start building metaverse strategies into their business plans in order to establish a distinctive presence in this new digital sphere. Another reason why there is heightened interest in the metaverse is technology has evolved to the point that it is possible to represent digital interfaces in immersive 3D graphics that mirror the real world, as opposed to the 2D “page” interface that is still typical on most e-commerce sites. These advances in computer hardware and software enable the metaverse. 

Additionally, the pandemic accelerated consumer adoption of immersive technologies and the metaverse. The study from Wunderman Thompson reveals “As COVID-19 restrictions ease, the acceleration of tech and its prominence in many lives will continue, with 76% of people saying their everyday lives depend on it and over half saying their happiness depends on it.” People are spending a considerable amount of time and placing a high value on their digital self to the point that their in-person lives are merging with their digital lives. The metaverse can be viewed as a natural progression of the convergence of people’s physical and digital lives. With the metaverse, people will spend their daily activities from socializing to working in virtual environments. 

Studies have shown that people already are spending more time interacting with their friends on social media and gaming platforms than in real life. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (July 2021), people in the US spent on average 6.5 hours per day online. People are only spending around 65 minutes per day seeing friends in person. Post-pandemic this ratio will increase further in favor of people spending more time on virtual interactions. The Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report Into the Metaverse states “As COVID-19 restrictions ease, the acceleration of tech and its prominence in many lives will continue” and sites that “93% of global consumers agree that technology is our future and over half (52%) say their happiness depends on it.”

How Brands are Already Leveraging Gaming, NFTs, and Virtual Stores

Gaming, one of the core components of the metaverse, has become an increasingly popular way for younger generations to connect and socialize virtually. The Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report notes that 59% of the US population classified themselves as gamers, including 90% of Gen Zers. This statistic is highly relevant to brands and retailers since the younger generations are gravitating towards gaming as means of entertainment and socializing. Luxury brands are already taking note of the younger consumers’ interest in gaming and are selling their products on gaming platforms. 

A Morgan Stanley report “Luxury in the Metaverse” states “metaverse gaming and NFTs will constitute 10% of the luxury goods market by 2030—a $56 billion revenue opportunity.” Brands are finding success in consumer engagement with virtual goods and NFTs. The Metaverse Mindset: Consumer Shopping Insights survey finds that 74% of Gen Zers have purchased a digital item, such as an accessory, skin, or garment for their avatar, within an online video game. The NFT market has had exponential growth. Morgan Stanley predicts that the NFT market will grow to $236.71bn by 2030 and forecasts that luxury digital/hybrid collectibles will be a $19.17bn market.

Many brands and retailers are leveraging virtual stores as an entry point into the metaverse. Consumers who are shopping in these 3D immersive virtual stores are finding them highly engaging. In fact, 70% have made a purchase in a virtual store. Brands are viewing virtual stores as a means to take their first step into the metaverse, create high customer engagement, and generate ROI. Learn how your brand can sell physical and digital products in the metaverse with a virtual store.

70% of consumers who have visited a virtual store have made a purchase, according to The Metaverse Mindset: Consumer Shopping Insights, a survey by Obsess.

The survey was designed to gauge consumers’ perceptions of and demand for virtual shopping experiences in the metaverse, a market opportunity that Bloomberg Intelligence estimates will reach nearly $800 billion by 2024.

Gen Z Consumers and the Metaverse

The Obsess survey found that nearly 75% of Gen Z shoppers have purchased a digital item within a video game and that 60% of these young shoppers think that brands should sell their products on metaverse platforms. Among Gen Zers who think brands should sell in the metaverse, 54% reasoned that people should be able to shop anywhere they go online, while 45% indicated that metaverse environments should be like online shopping malls. 

In addition, 41% of these Gen Zers said brands should sell in the metaverse because it gives consumers a convenient place to buy digital products like nonfungible tokens (NFTs) as well as physical products.

The Obsess survey also found that fully one-third of all survey respondents, including 40% of Gen Zers and 40% of millennials, would be interested in shopping for real or virtual products in metaverse environments that brands create.

“Our data indicate that the majority of younger consumers want to be able to shop their favorite brands anywhere they go online, including on metaverse platforms,” said Neha Singh, CEO of Obsess in a statement. “These shoppers have grown up with online videogames, esports and social media and many of them see the emerging metaverse as a modern-day mall—a connected virtual world where they can hang out, shop and socialize. For retail brands, these survey findings highlight the importance of creating sound metaverse commerce strategies today that will resonate with consumers over the coming years.”

About a quarter of consumers have shopped online in a 3D virtual store. Among that group, 70% — including 69% of Gen Zers, 77% of millennials and 67% of Gen Xers — have made a purchase in a virtual store. Such stores are widely seen as brands’ entryway into the metaverse

The majority of consumers who shop in a 3D virtual store find it highly engaging. Among respondents who had previously shopped online in a virtual store, 60% indicated that they are likely to do so again, including 54% of Gen Zers, 68% of millennials and 67% of Gen Xers.

Gamified Virtual Environments

Online video game platforms are key metaverse shopping environments: Nearly three-quarters (74%) of Gen Zers and 62% of respondents overall have purchased a digital item—such as an accessory, skin or garment for their avatar—within an online video game.

In addition, more than half of respondents (52%) said they would pay up to $49.99 for a virtual product for their avatar to use within an online video game.

When asked about their interest in exploring worlds, islands or environments created by their favorite brands in online videogames, 51% of Gen Zers and 44% of millennials indicated they would be very interested in doing so. This compares with 41% of Gen Zers and 38% of millennials who said they would be interested in exploring any metaverse environments brands create.

Not all consumers are clear on how the metaverse is defined: Just over half (53%) of respondents said they are very or somewhat familiar with the term metaverse, indicating that retail brands will need to establish clear messaging when it comes to describing their metaverse offerings to consumers.

Some 40% of all respondents think the metaverse is still in the conceptual stage, but that it will eventually take the form of connected online technology platforms that people will navigate using a digital avatar, while more than a quarter (27%) mistakenly perceive that the term metaverse refers to a technology owned by Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

Methodology

Obsess’s The Metaverse Mindset: Consumer Shopping Insights survey was fielded from 1,001 U.S. consumers who were surveyed online by Kantar from December 22 to December 29, 2021. Gen Zers are defined as consumers ages 16–24, millennials as ages 25–40, Gen Xers as ages 41–56, and baby boomers/silvers as age 57 and older.

There are varied predictions about the return of foot traffic to retail stores in the post-pandemic world, and the changing role of stores. Regardless of whether consumers visit stores more or less than before, increasing the ROI on retail space investments is a higher priority for brands than ever before. One way to enhance the scope and reach of your brick-and-mortar store is to digitize it. A photorealistic, 3D virtual version of your store can drive engagement and gain traction nationally and worldwide, whereas the brick-and-mortar is dependent upon regional, foot traffic.

Utilizing virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) technologies, it is possible to digitally recreate physical stores in photorealistic, 3D e-commerce sites that includes both in-store and online inventory for a fully shoppable online store experience. Essentially creating a shoppable virtual tour of the retail store. These virtual stores are designed to drive discovery, engagement, click-through, session duration, average order value, and conversion for leading retailers and brands.

Benefits of Virtualizing Retail Stores

• Store becomes accessible to a wider audience 
• Remote shopping enabled
• Makes in-store inventory digitally accessible

Retailers can use the Obsess Experiential E-commerce Platform™ to virtualize their retail stores at a high resolution and with a fast turnaround time.

Neha Singh, CEO of Obsess, comments, “This is a very easy way to create a much richer experience for consumers online, because you already have your retail stores that you have constructed and merchandised with so much effort. A much wider audience can now visit your store, and shop it without having to physically go to the store.”

Ralph Lauren’s series of virtual flagships is a relevant example of transforming physical locations into 3D, immersive digital experiences. Ralph Lauren (RL) has virtual store recreations for their Boston, Beverly Hills, Hong Kong and Paris store locations. By visiting the Ralph Lauren website and by clicking on the “RL Virtual Experience” page, a visitor can travel around the world with Ralph Lauren virtually and be immersed in photorealistic renderings of their renowned and unique flagship stores in various locations. Customers can click on any product in the virtual store, and order it online, call the store or add it to their wishlist. The “RL Virtual Experience” serves as a new sales channel in addition to Ralph Lauren’s retail stores and e-commerce website.

Ralph Lauren Virtual Experience

Ralph Lauren’s digitization of their famous flagship stores around the world inspired American Girl to take a step forward in virtualizing their iconic stores, providing access to consumers everywhere. They decided to launch their virtual store to celebrate the brand’s 35th anniversary. The virtual American Girl Place is an immersive experience embedded in the brand’s website that allows customers to explore the brand’s store and shop from their computers or mobile devices.

Retail TouchPoints noted that “the results of American Girl’s virtual store have been clear, with high traffic across both experiences, strong engagement and solid click-through rates.”

The American Girl Virtual Experience

Now, American Girl customers do not have to travel to New York City to experience the magic of the flagship store, they can do it virtually from the comfort of their home. Customers can even partake virtually in the location’s most popular experiences including booking tables and parties at the American Girl Café. The ability to book reservations is made possible through an integration between the virtual store and the actual store’s reservation system.

Digitizing your brick-and-mortar store is a simple way to enhance its ROI. By virtualizing your physical store, you will reach a larger audience worldwide, enable remote shopping, and ensure your in-store inventory is digitally accessible. Learn more about how to create shoppable virtual tours of your retail stores. 

Pop-up stores have been a hugely successful retail strategy and revenue driver for many brands. However, they drive a finite amount of sales, dependent on the time span of opening and foot traffic in the area. Virtual stores are a solution to the restrictive nature of pop-ups as they maximize the potential of a pop-up store, making it accessible and shoppable from anywhere at any time.

Key benefits of a virtual pop-up: 

• Significantly widens audience for the pop-up store
• A virtual version can stay open longer than a physical version, driving sell-through
• Provides deeper insight into consumers’ interests and interactions with key data

An example of this is when multi-retailer MyTheresa created an immersive, 3D shopping experience for Moncler, powered by Obsess. Situated in the sprawling Alps is a 3D-rendered, photorealistic image of Austria’s Timmelsjoch museum, which houses Moncler’s collection as well as information on the history and culture of the area. Symbolic of the ethos behind outerwear innovator Moncler, it’s a future-facing design that also complements the natural world that surrounds it. The virtual experience has a pop-up that educates the user on Moncler’s origin story and shares the brand’s evolution story.

Below, we highlight other virtual pop-up experiences Obsess has created:

Terez Virtual Pop-up

Activewear brand Terez created a virtual version of their pop-up store in Soho New York. The virtual pop-up brought the Terez website to life with the vibrant colorful décor of the store. With Shopify integration, customers could shop products directly from the virtual store. Activations in the physical store were also digitized in interactive ways–in the virtual version, clicking on the leaves of the positivity tree brought up different positive affirmations.

Tommy Hilfiger Virtual Pop-up

Tommy Hilfiger created a virtual pop-up for an influencer collaboration with Zendaya. With their first experiential pop-up store in NYC, the shoppable virtual tour highlighted the 70s-themed zodiac-inspired prints and made all products digitally shoppable. Activations like tarot card readings and horoscopes were added as content engagement interactions.

Digitizing a pop-up store into a virtual store can serve as a valuable sales tool that also provides insightful data about prospective customers. To find out more information on how you can virtualize your pop-up store, click on this link.

As consumer behaviors and expectations evolve, the e-commerce interface also evolves. Virtual stores are a new type of digital shopping experience that provide more engagement and immersion for a brand’s customers. These immersive, 360-degree experiences live on a brand’s e-commerce site and are available to access via mobile or desktop. Customers can navigate around the 3D space, similar to how they would browse a real-life store.

Why are virtual stores needed?

Amazon created the traditional e-commerce interface 25 years ago to sell books but it has not changed since. Most e-commerce sites continue to use the monotonous grid of thumbnails on a white background, regardless of brand, category or collection. However, with virtual stores, brands are able to offer consumers an experiential online experience that is highly visual and creative.

Virtual stores inspire consumers by contextualizing merchandising in fantastically creative environments. With a virtual store, custom designs are possible for every brand, category and collection. Brands are able to showcase curated products in contextual environments that enable consumers to visualize their usage. Using CGI technology, products are merchandised in a virtual store, allowing customers to ‘pick them up’ as they move around.

Virtual stores can house engaging content and features, catering to younger audiences—a valuable target for many brands. Millennials and Gen Z expect visual content and interactivity in online experiences, because of gaming and social media. 

Virtual stores have a natural interface for digital shopping, making this an intuitive experience for any demographic. They are easy to access with a web link, and don’t require an app download or a Virtual Reality (VR) headset.

Virtual Stores and the Metaverse

As explained in the “The Metaverse is the New Mall”, the metaverse is a connected, 3D virtual world. Here, consumers are able to interact in real time with the digital environment and everything and everyone in it. Virtual stores serve as the starting point for brands to enter the metaverse.

Virtual stores also enable brands to connect with younger consumers; they provide brands with valuable analytical data and insights into consumer behavior. Obsess provides detailed, anonymized first-party data on every consumer interaction that occurs within a brands’ own virtual store.

“A brand can see how many people are visiting each section of the virtual store, how much time they are spending in each section, which products they are selecting and the items they are adding to their cart among other things.” -AdAge

Today, brands and retailers globally are already using virtual stores on their websites for a variety of different purposes. Brands are creating unique and memorable experiences for their customers, increasing engagement, sales and brand loyalty. The Obsess experiential e-commerce platform enables brands to create photorealistic 3D virtual stores with full e-commerce integration. See below for some examples of how brands are using virtual stores:

Ralph Lauren Virtual Stores

Ralph Lauren offered their global audience a unique online experience by virtualizing their physical retail stores. Through their virtual stores, they created a hybrid experience combining brick-and-mortar and online shopping. This allows consumers to virtually step into the elegant world of Ralph Lauren’s iconic retail spaces around the world from their own home. Read more about The RL Virtual Experience in this Forbes article

Charlotte Tilbury Virtual Stores

The Charlotte Tilbury virtual store is an immersive, three-dimensional shopping environment guided by a “Magic Charlotte” avatar. In the virtual store, customers can explore, shop, receive personalized advice and product recommendations, join live events and watch tutorials. Read more about the Charlotte Tilbury experience here.  

American Girl Virtual Store and Museum

For American Girl, Obsess developed two virtual experiences — a digital version of the brand’s famed Rockefeller Center flagship and a virtual museum that has no real-world equivalent. “Our ultimate goal is to create a completely different way for customers to engage with and shop American Girl online,” said Stacy Carpenter, User Experience Senior Manager at American Girl in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. Read more about the American Girl virtual experiences here.   

theSkimm Virtual Holiday Village

theSkimm’s Virtual Holiday Village is a virtually created holiday market set in an outdoor winter wonderland resembling Bryant Park in NYC. The virtual market is meant to inspire gifting; consumers can travel from cabin to cabin and to shop products. Read more about theSkimm’s Virtual Holiday Experience here. 

Learn more about how leading brands are leveraging virtual stores by clicking here. If you’re interested in creating a virtual store for your brand, book a demo or email us at contact@obsessvr.com.

Facebook’s rebrand as Meta underscored how timely it is for brands to build experiential e-commerce experiences in their business strategies. As the next generation of the internet, the metaverse is a connected, 3D virtual world for consumers to interact with everything and everyone in it. Users can shop, play games, learn and attend events, or use the space to hang out and socialize with one another.

That means, essentially, the metaverse is the new mall.

Morgan Stanley says metaverse gaming and NFTs will constitute 10% of the luxury goods market by 2030—a $56 billion revenue opportunity. Today, the largest metaverse platforms are Roblox and Fortnite—with 45 million daily active users and 350 million monthly active users, respectively. The metaverse will evolve quickly; new offerings that aren’t strictly gaming will emerge, drawing their own purpose-based communities of users.

Forward-thinking brands and retailers are already creating immersive e-commerce experiences such as 3D virtual flagship and pop-up stores. Technology advances empower brands to create immersive online shopping experiences that are richer, more dynamic and interactive than ever before.

Over the next decade, the spending power of today’s teenagers will increase significantly. This cohort’s expectations will define the future of experiential e-commerce within the metaverse. As digital natives who grew up interacting online, they’ll expect the entire shopping journey to be personal, interactive and customizable.

Here are 4 factors that will play a major role in defining the future of experiential e-commerce:

1. The Metaverse Is Taking Shape

Brands will create custom shopping environments on metaverse platforms that allow consumers to do more than just browse and purchase. Shoppers can interact with one another, with brands and their products, as well as design, clothe and accessorize their digital avatars, attend events and fashion shows and participate in other activities. According to a Wunderman Thompson Intelligence Report Into the Metaverse, “Digital engagement is moving from passive consumption to active creation–shifting creative power to the user.” 

The emerging class of products that bridge the physical and digital worlds will take center stage in the metaverse. Brands ranging from luxury leaders to CPG makers are already selling digital assets as NFTs and giving consumers the option to buy physical versions of some of the virtual items, too. Dolce & Gabbana, for example, recently sold a collection including both NFTs and physical items at auction for the cryptocurrency equivalent of $6 million.

The metaverse will evolve based on computer hardware and software advancement, including an increased ability to represent digital interfaces in immersive, 3D graphics that mirror the real world as opposed to the 2D interface typical on most e-commerce sites. Brands need to begin defining how they will represent themselves in the metaverse because shoppers—especially younger demographics—will expect to seamlessly engage with every aspect of their online lives throughout the connected virtual world we’ll inhabit.

2. E-Commerce Will Become More Natural and More Social in the Metaverse

Technology is driving a more futuristic e-commerce experience, to become much more natural, social and intuitive—such as in real life. In real life, such as in malls, we often shop in the company of others. Shopping in a 3D, photorealistic virtual store with a few pals who can provide real-time advice via live video about a particular fall jacket or shade of lipstick will soon become the norm. Shoppers and their avatars will be able to see, hear and follow each other throughout virtual stores, providing inspiration and feedback to one another.

This social shopping capability will go beyond what consumers have come to expect from the livestream shopping experience. Participants will be able to choose who they want to invite to a private shopping outing in a virtual store and interact with influencers and sales associates via video or avatars in the immersive environment.

3. The Lines Between Gaming and Shopping Will Vanish

The largest gaming platforms have built-in communities of players where brands can find new audiences for their products. Younger generations of consumers likely grew up playing multiplayer video games and watching esports. They already expect to be able to interact with other people and brands everywhere they go online. In the future, consumers will expect their entire shopper journey, including virtual stores, to be customized and rendered dynamically.

Brands, from Ralph Lauren to Gillette, have enabled consumers to obtain virtual clothing, accessories and skins to personalize avatars in various games. The next step is full integration of e-commerce shopping and gaming. Brands across price points are already seeing strong consumer engagement with their immersive virtual store experiences.

4. VR Headsets Will Make Shopping Irresistibly Immersive

Virtual reality headsets like the Oculus, faced some stumbles in consumer adoption when they first hit the market. But the technology has rapidly improved and the pandemic has proven a tailwind for the devices. Consumers flocked to multiplayer video games and online fitness platforms while stuck at home during lockdowns; there’s now a new audience that knows firsthand how much more exciting and realistic virtual worlds can be when experienced through a VR headset.

Statista forecasts more than 26 million AR and VR headsets will be sold each year by 2023. A recent survey found that nearly a quarter (23%) of Americans have now used one of the devices. VR headset ownership still skews male, but with large numbers of women continuing to join at-home online fitness platforms, the ratio is shifting.

Some brands are already building headset-enabled experiences into their e-commerce and in-store strategies. Shopping with a VR headset is an immersive experience that can’t be replicated on a laptop or mobile phone.

Morgan Stanley states in their “Luxury in the Metaverse” report, “It is no surprise that gaming tends to be a past-time for younger consumers and likely always will be. The transition to fully immersive virtual reality (VR) Metaverse experiences also naturally lends itself to the same younger cohorts. VR is not a prerequisite for Metaverse experiences, nor gaming platforms; yet it adds to the immersive experience, encouraging longer game time.”

The Takeaway

As retail companies experiment with novel ways to sell, reach new consumer audiences, and drive sustainability, interactive shopping experiences will become table stakes for brands in every category. We’re quickly moving toward online store environments that feel as sensorially rich and immersive as physical stores, and as personalized. Companies are already building and hosting branded, 3D virtual worlds on their own websites and these spaces will be part of metaverse platforms in the near future. By creating their own visually unique virtual planets, islands, stores and more, these brands are presenting products in a discovery-driven manner that’s never before been possible online.

One of the things that sets these future-looking companies apart is that they’re thinking about virtual selling organizationally and creating specific line items for experiential e-commerce in their budgets. It’s key for all brands to have three- to five-year plans for their experiential e-commerce and metaverse initiatives. Technology enabling these experiences are evolving quickly. Brands will have to watch the space closely to see which developments align with their goals, business model and target audiences, and invest accordingly.

At some point, the word “metaverse” will fall out of common use, just as “cyberspace” has over time. We’ll all just refer to immersive virtual spaces as “the internet” rather than a separate part of it. Having a presence in this virtual world will be as important as having an e-commerce website for brands.