The Evolution Of Retail: The Present And the Future
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The way we make purchases is changing dramatically. As technology and buyer behaviour changes, both online and offline stores have to adapt to keep up and avoid missing out on their piece of the pie.
The last couple of years have seen furniture stores follow suit. As a traditional industry (we’ve always needed furniture!), it hasn’t had to evolve much – until now. Expect amazing new ways to style your home as well as more convenient ways to pay, so you can stop missing out on the quality pieces you really want.
Two of the
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major progressions in this area include the introduction of Virtual Reality and Afterpay, so let’s take a deeper look into the benefits of both and which stores have begun harnessing their power.
AR and VR will let you virtually place furniture in your home
Want to know what that beautiful sofa will look like in your living room, without having to measure it up, pay for it and get the delivery team over? With Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), some of the big players in the market want to make that a
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3
possibility.
The online marketplace, Amazon, has updated its app, which now lets you select home decor items and furniture and use your phone to see how they would fit in a certain room. You can even rotate and move it around the room to see where it’s going to best look, to help avoid the dreaded buyer’s remorse.
It’s no surprise that brick-and-mortar stores are beginning to panic since so many consumers prefer to do their shopping from the comfort of their home on their smartphone, tablet or laptop. To bring them into
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4
the future and regain their competitiveness, US giant Macy’s has begun trialling VR in their stores. By merging new technologies with the physical store experience, customers can use the immersive shopping technology to add furniture to their room and see what it’d look like, before committing to buy.
While boosting sales, Macy’s CEO Jeff Genette said that it also allows them to “sell more furniture with less, or even no, square footage devoted to displaying it.”
New ways to pay for your furniture
In
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2017, homeware purchases rose by a significant 21.3% compared to the previous year. Could this be because stores are making smart choices and offering more flexible payment options to their customers?
It’s likely. With the introduction of Afterpay, consumers can purchase virtually what they want, when they want it. Since furniture generally falls in the higher value spectrum, it has always been an investment for most of the public when they needed to upgrade, say, their bed or wardrobe.
With tools like Afterpay, a furniture store paves
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a more convenient avenue for their customers who otherwise might not have been able to afford to make a purchase. There’s no delay in the delivery of their items and they can arrange to pay in instalments, without the added stress of interest or fees, that would be associated with more traditional payment methods like credit cards.
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Emily Wilson - 6 Jun 19
The way we make purchases is changing dramatically. As technology and buyer behaviour changes, both online and offline stores have to adapt to keep up and avoid missing out on their piece of the pie.
The last couple of years have seen furniture stores follow suit. As a traditional industry (we’ve always needed furniture!), it hasn’t had to evolve much – until now. Expect amazing new ways to style your home as well as more convenient ways to pay, so you can stop missing out on the quality pieces you really want.
Two of the major progressions in this area include the introduction of Virtual Reality and Afterpay, so let’s take a deeper look into the benefits of both and which stores have begun harnessing their power.
AR and VR will let you virtually place furniture in your home
Want to know what that beautiful sofa will look like in your living room, without having to measure it up, pay for it and get the delivery team over? With Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR), some of the big players in the market want to make that a possibility.
The online marketplace, Amazon, has updated its app, which now lets you select home decor items and furniture and use your phone to see how they would fit in a certain room. You can even rotate and move it around the room to see where it’s going to best look, to help avoid the dreaded buyer’s remorse.
It’s no surprise that brick-and-mortar stores are beginning to panic since so many consumers prefer to do their shopping from the comfort of their home on their smartphone, tablet or laptop. To bring them into the future and regain their competitiveness, US giant Macy’s has begun trialling VR in their stores. By merging new technologies with the physical store experience, customers can use the immersive shopping technology to add furniture to their room and see what it’d look like, before committing to buy.
While boosting sales, Macy’s CEO Jeff Genette said that it also allows them to “sell more furniture with less, or even no, square footage devoted to displaying it.”
New ways to pay for your furniture
In 2017, homeware purchases rose by a significant 21.3% compared to the previous year. Could this be because stores are making smart choices and offering more flexible payment options to their customers?
It’s likely. With the introduction of Afterpay, consumers can purchase virtually what they want, when they want it. Since furniture generally falls in the higher value spectrum, it has always been an investment for most of the public when they needed to upgrade, say, their bed or wardrobe.
With tools like Afterpay, a furniture store paves a more convenient avenue for their customers who otherwise might not have been able to afford to make a purchase. There’s no delay in the delivery of their items and they can arrange to pay in instalments, without the added stress of interest or fees, that would be associated with more traditional payment methods like credit cards.
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