How Can Augmented Reality Benefit Your Ecommerce Store in 2022?

Benefits of AR in Ecommerce

We’ve covered several examples of how your ecommerce store can leverage AR for awareness and conversions.

Now, let’s look at some of the tech’s key benefits for online business owners. Why should your ecommerce store jump on the AR train?

Engage users

By offering your potential customers a novel, fun, and – most importantly – interactive way to communicate with your brand, you’re making it more likely that they’ll do so.

Compare a traditional form of marketing – let’s say an ad on the billboard or subway – with the attention-grabbing effect of an engaging AR filter. One of these you’ll see, then forget about. The other you can play with, share with your friends, then save to revisit later. Which one would you remember?

Bring customizable products to life

When you have so many products on your site, it’s difficult to make them stand out. Most ecommerce websites have gridlocks of products – stuffed in side by side, with nothing to differentiate them from each other (or worse: from your competitors!).

AR can fix this. By letting your customer edit and personalize your products to their exact preferences, you can imbue your bog standard images with movement and magic; bringing them to life with vibrancy and vigor.

Personalize the customer experience

Whether it’s helping a customer visualize how a table or sofa will look in their living room, or which color paint to opt for in the den, AR helps them form a personal connection to the product.

It ensures the customer never feels like ‘a number’, and boosts their perceptions of your business as relatable, empathetic, and human.

It also makes it likely that they’ll eschew other brands, too. After all, if they’ve gone to all the trouble to use AR to compare your site’s colors and products, they’re unlikely to then jump ship to another company!

Reduce return rates

Statistics suggest that at least 30% of online store orders result in returns – compared to less than 9% of purchases in bricks and mortar stores. It makes sense, too – people can’t try on online items before they buy. So, they end up having to send things back because they don’t look right, or are the wrong size.

For online businesses, this is an issue – but one that, thankfully, AR can solve.

By allowing consumers to ‘try on’ products (be they makeup, clothes, or jewellry), customers can be sure their purchase doesn’t just look right, but feels right, too. There’ll be less indecision at the point of sale, and – hopefully – more satisfaction when they open the package.

Increase sales

Last – but certainly not least – AR can boost your business’s sales. (And, as the data suggests, by up to 200%, too!)

This benefit feels pretty intuitive. After all, if you can use AR to engage your customers, reduce return rates, and personalize your products, well…more sales won’t be too far behind!