Walmart realizes immersive shopping continues to lie at the fringes of consumer commerce. It includes everything from 3D models and “product spinners” in eCommerce to virtual try-ons and dimensional product visualization using your smartphone camera. It’s all about meeting camera-native Gen-Z where they are.
We’re seeing ample investment in this technology from the likes of Amazon, Google, and other tech-first marketing and commerce players. Then there are retailers themselves leaning into it. One example is IKEA, whose Place App lets users virtually place furniture around their room to see what fits.
The latest move to appear on our radar screens is from another retailer: Walmart. Its virtual showroom feature lets users outfit a room with various items. This includes a virtual staging area, with a sidebar where items can be dynamically dropped in for users’ “rapid prototyping” in their room-design efforts.
The idea is to expand beyond other immersive shopping products that focus on one item at a time. With a full-room UX, users can get a more multi-dimensional understanding of how colors and styles play off each other. And for Walmart, it could be a clever trojan horse to boost basket sizes and ARPU.
Immersive Endeavors
Panning back, Walmart’s virtual showroom is just one of several immersive balls in the air. In fact, this is the company’s sixth such effort in the past two years – some of which we’ve covered – from furniture to cosmetics try-ons and social features. Altogether it signals a long-term commitment to the technology.
Perhaps more telling than user-facing features is the fact that Walmart has developed its own full-blown platform. Known as Retina, it powers all of Walmart’s immersive shopping endeavors. More to the point, one doesn’t invest in building a bona fide platform if they aren’t all-in on a given technology
That investment is driven by a few things, including conversion boosts from virtual try-ons – a result of strengthening buyer confidence. Similarly, it can lessen return rates as shoppers have a better sense of what they’re getting. There’s also the increasingly spending-empowered Gen Z, as noted.
Zeroing in on that last part, we’ve learned from discussions with Snap that Gen Z represents about $3 trillion in collective purchasing power. They’re camera-native and increasingly expect immersive experiences in their shopping. So Walmart’s moves here involve future-proofing, among other things.
Down-Market Migration
When looking at all the above, the broader effect will be to accelerate adoption. It’s a familiar cycle: early adopters (Walmart in this case) offer technology and condition user behavior. That behavior grows into expectation, at which point other retailers are forced to adopt it as a competitive imperative.
Meanwhile, Walmart is thinking bigger by examining how AI feeds into and fuels immersive shopping. In fact, it could be a force multiplier in streamlining experience creation. This is currently an expensive bottleneck, including generating accurate 3D product models with color and texture variations.
The key term above is “generate,” as that’s what AI is becoming very good at. Rather than utilizing photogrammetry – the traditional process of stitching together multi-angle HD photography – generative AI could accelerate and lower costs by simulating 3D product models in more automated ways.
That last part is critical for this technology’s down-market migration. Like several other technologies, it starts with the Walmarts and IKEAs of the world, before trickling down to SMBs. We’ve seen this movie before. The question is how long… and AI’s role in the equation could speed up that traditional timeline.
