The online grocery and food products provider, BigBasket, has announced that it will soon be bridging the gap between the online and physical store shopping experience by offering customer a virtual reality (VR) store. The new VR store will allow users a chance to look around and browse products just as they would in a physical store and then inspect them by interacting with them, before moving on to place an order.
This new platform is being developed by Bengaluru-based VR startup GMETRI, The News Minute reports. The startup was founded in early 2017 by Utsav Mathur and Sahil Ahuja and builds immersive virtual and augmented reality (AR) experiences designed to function on online across all devices. Now they are working with BigBasket to bring their VR shopping platform to life.
The VR store front is being designed to hopefully result in an increase in customer engagement which is something that many online stores can struggle with. How to keep a customer engaged for long periods of time and ensure that they make the purchase on the platform are both factors that are driving the design of the shopping experience to meet the needs of BigBasket, which is hopes will be resolved thanks to VR.
GMETRI’s VR platform also gives BigBasket insights into consumer behavior that will help improve the user experience both in the virtual and real worlds. GMETRI provide insights into a number of different data pools including real-time population, analytics and gaze detection. This ensures the company is able to understand which products consumers find interesting along with the sales performance of them.
“With gaze data capture, you gain valuable insights by observing the users’ movements and actions inside the VR experience,” Utsav explains. He continues by adding that their recent pilot run in Bengaluru saw immense response: “The kind of numbers we reported from the pilot are amazing. We saw an exceptional bounce rate, which means that every user stays on the app for a longer time and the engagement factor is very high. We have successfully proven this with over 10,000 users,”
By leveraging the immersive power of VR to offer their consumers a new way to shop with them, BigBasket is hoping to find new revenue along with a better understanding of their customer. As GMETRI continue to develop their platform for a range of clients, VRFocus will be sure to bring you all the latest in the future.