‘More than half of your customers are delaying – and almost a third are cancelling – purchases of big ticket items such as furniture. This reluctance is frequently due to a lack of confidence: visualising how an item will fit into a home, or even its configured state, is just too difficult,’ says David Colijn, iONE360 cmo.
‘When customers don’t buy, it’s a silent protest, and it costs brands and retailers a lot of money. Customers are saying: “If you can’t show me what I want to buy and reassure me that it will fit in my home, I’ll find someone else who can, or I won’t buy at all.”
Today, consumers expect excellent product information and visualisation at their fingertips. The technology for this exists in other industries, such as the automotive sector. So why is the home and decor sector lagging behind?
‘The furniture industry has always struggled with providing visuals of all its items in every variant. Logistically and financially, it has been impossible. Furniture products can have thousands of possible variants, and that’s just one product in a company’s catalogue. We don’t need to do the maths to understand the scale of the issue.
‘Solving this visualisation issue is a very attractive prospect. Getting it right would lead to higher conversion rates, higher average order value, higher customer satisfaction, and cost savings on services, returns and error correction.
‘What if we told you the technology now exists to make all of this possible, and to do so affordably?’
To help brands and large retailers understand this technology, Colijn will host a free webinar on 25 April.
‘This is designed to explain the basic principles of 3D visual configuration and explore relevant considerations, such as: is it just a phase or here to stay? Should we act on it? Why? When? Is it difficult? Is it costly? I’m a manufacturer, isn’t this for retail? I’m retail, shouldn’t my supplier handle this? By attending the webinar, you will be able to distinguish technologies such as CGI, 360-spinners, AR, VR and room planners. You will be armed with the knowledge to consider which technologies are best suited for your organisation and what to look for when selecting a vendor.’
iONE360 is part of the Colijn Group, a market leader in developing software for the furniture industry in Western Europe. Drawing on 41 years of experience, the company has accumulated expert knowledge in furniture and the associated data logistics, servicing renowned household brands. Its software solutions are embedded with this experience, allowing it to offer some of the best visual commerce solutions globally for the home and decor industry.