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If you are a retailer, manufacturer or interior designer, the digital shopping experience you provide for customers can make or break your business. This is especially true if you sell large ranges of products such as home furniture, bathware and gym equipment. Being able to create a room plan adds instant value and is one of the most effective ways to boost customer engagement and sales.
But what is a room planning solution and how can it enhance your online sales process?
In this article, we’ll answer these questions and explain how integrating room design technology into your website will give customers a significantly better ecommerce experience.
What is a 3D Room Planner
In essence, 3D room design tools are the next evolution of online product visualisation. This family of retail focused solutions includes 3D Product Visualisation, Product Configurators and Augmented Reality. A Room Planner enables customers, interior designers and stylists to create their dream home without needing any special skills. The planning occurs in hiqh quality 3D on your website and best of all, doesn’t require moving physical furniture in your living room.
For customers, using an online room planner can revolutionise their home design process and provide an immersive shopping experience that makes online shopping easy.
For retailers, a Room Planner can speed up the sales process, providing valuable information about customer requirements, giving customers a better way to design their floor plan and create a new sales channel to acquire leads.
Why Integrate a 3D Room Planner into Your Sales Process
According to a 2023 report conducted by eMarketer and Oberlo, almost 33.4% of people are shopping online. This would equate to 2.64 billion customers and this number is expected to increase to 2.77 billion in 2025.
Around 53% of consumers worldwide stated they purchase or intend to buy home decor, furniture and bathroom products online. If you are a retailer with an ecommerce website and sell a large range of products, letting customers build a room layout and furnish it with your full furniture catalog can give you significant advantage over competitors.
How Can An Online Room Planner Tool Increase Sales?
The implementation of room building software has multiple advantages for retailers and customers. For retailers, the most important benefits are increasing multi-product sales and creating a better online shopping experience.
Customers are looking for an easy way to create a floor plan, design their room layout and visualise it in high quality 3D. They should be able to combine multiple products together, change configurable product options and see how the overall design fits together. This speeds up the sales process and gives customers greater purchase confidence.
Better Customer Experience & Brand Recognition
When implementing a Room Planner and Augmented Reality into your website, you can achieve many goals:
- Enhance your ecommerce experience, demonstrating to customers that you are prioritising a better online shopping and product browsing experience.
- Show that you can provide an innovative digital shopping experience that leverages technology and gives them access to your entire furniture catalog.
- Stand out from competitors with a more engaging and interactive customer experience.
On-Page SEO Benefits
On-page SEO refers to the time people spend on your website and the more time customers stay on your website, the better. A room layout designer allows your customers to try many products and visualise their interior design, engaging with your product range and helping your website perform better in search engine rankings.
A higher level of engagement means search engines are more likely to display your website when customers search for furniture, bathroom products and more. Thus, your website traffic increases, leading to greater product views and more online sales.
Improved Customer Engagement & Satisfaction
Displaying 3D products on your website gives your customers a more interactive and immersive shopping experience, boosting engagement. So how does a 3D Room Planner function and what can customers achieve?
A room designer gives customers a better idea of their layout and how to decorate their space. They can select from your full product catalog, change furniture via drag & drop and try different layouts. Customers can match their existing plans and create an unlimited number of room designs to find a solution that fits their requirements. Throughout this process, they are directly engaging with your product catalog and increasing purchase confidence.
INHAABIT offers an ultra-realistic Room Planner, which will display your products in the highest 3D quality, ensuring materials and sizing are accurate.
A room planner can be used to plan products and placement for a customer’s home or office space. For example, a 3D Bathroom Planner will streamline the bathroom renovation process, allowing customers to add toilets, showers, vanity units, baths, tiles and basins to create the perfect sanctuary. Learn how Highgrove Bathrooms increased their engagement and sales with an online bathroom panner.
For interior designers, a living room designer can help them create the perfect living space, find the correct sofa to fit and add accessories such as chairs, tables and lighting. When it comes to an office space, industry professionals can create an arrangement of workspaces to maximise their floorspace, ensure there is adequate room for movement and create an aesthetically pleasing room design.
Increase Multi-Product Sales
While 3D Product Visualisation allows customers to explore individual 3D products in detail, a Room Planner allows them to combine many products together and promotes multi-product sales. For manufacturers and retailers, it allows customers to explore an entire catalogue such as furniture, floor tiles, wall materials, accessories, lighting and much more. Retailers can use design themes to create curated rooms with matching products, helping customers achieve a particular look.
Allowing customers to explore your furniture in 3D creates a realistic shopping experience, combining the physical aspects of visiting a showroom and the ability to try any product in their living room. Customers can focus on the room layout experience, engaging with your product range and increasing confidence.
A More Streamlined Sales Process
A 3D room builder can streamline and fast track your sales process. Without the ability to see a 3D floor plan, creating a living room design or bathroom layout can result in hesitation and lower quality leads.
An online room planner is easy for customer to use, with no learning curve. It frees up sales and marketing resources and removes the need for your interior design team to manually create 3D renders. Staff can then focus on more important parts of the sales experience and acquiring new customer leads.
The combination of interior design and Augmented Reality technology improves customer engagement, helping them visualise furniture with realistic sizing and placement. The AR experience allows them to walkthrough a digitally furnished room in real time, just by using their mobile phone.
3D Room Planning Helps You Acquire Customer Analytics
A 3D room building solution allows retailers and manufacturers acquire in-depth customer analytics, helping them gather new insights into buyer behaviour. This ranges from capturing the most popular products to multi-product data, allowing retailers to increase the revenue per customer and showcase in-demand product ranges.
A room designer provides an immersive online experience that can be connected with your Google Analytics account to capture important statistics in one place. This allows for more comprehensive statistics analysis, planning and online improvements.
Multi-Channel Cross Platform Customer Experience
A Room Planner can be an immersive cross platform experience that elevates your product range above competitors. Customers can access the high quality 3D models on any popular device such as desktop, tablet and mobile phones. Industry professionals can also be on the move or engage with customers instore, to provide a professional planning experience with ready made designs.
Additional features include the ability to explore predesigned layouts, zoom in for more detail and roate the room in 360 degrees. The cross platform planning experience can enhance your multi-channel marketing strategy, allowing you to engagee prospects on multiple platforms and promote your product range in ultra-realistic 3D.
3D Home Design Is Reshaping The Retail Industry & Interior Design
It’s a well know fact that people process images faster than words. This means that showcasing your products via a 3D Room Planner is much more effective than browsing imagery on a product page. With ecommerce accelerating rapidly, the best online retail technology can provide a powerful advantage over your competition.
While many world famous brands are already increasing customer engagement with 3D products and Modular Configurators, a Room Planner is the next evolution, reshaping online retail and bringing a virtual showroom to customers.
