How Designhubz is Shielding Retail Brands from the Coronavirus Impact

As the coronavirus dominates headlines and continues to test businesses of all shapes and sizes, retail brands stand at the front lines of its crippling impact. While a few big box retailers like Amazon and Target are seeing the ugly side of panic buying, most brands are struggling to keep sales up.

It’s no secret that supply chains have been hit and customers are avoiding public spaces like shopping centers and malls. In fact, a whopping 47% of US shoppers are avoiding or limiting visits to shopping centers and malls and 30% are avoiding stores in general. With it, a need has emerged for retailers to not only reassess their operations but also look for new and improved ways to increase digital sales. Now naturally ecommerce is expected to see a boost and brands are moving fast to direct all their efforts online.

Interestingly though, there’s a new kind of buzz around immersive online shopping technologies. And for good reason.

Enter 3D and Augmented Reality enabled shopping.

At Designhubz, we’re proud advocates of understanding the challenges brands  and retailers face and addressing them with our technology. At the end of the day, online shopping journeys aren’t always linear, especially at a time of crisis.

As a general first step, we like to think about our customers aka retail partners and brands and their customers a.k.a offline and online shoppers and evaluate how we can empower them both. In this article, we’re sharing exactly what we are doing to help retailers and their customers. In the meantime, please continue to take care of yourselves and each other.

1. Helping brands deliver in-store shopping experiences, online

Most of you are aware of how 3D and especially augmented reality helps brands deliver a try-before-you-buy online experience that replicates and is often better than an in-store shopping experience.

An experience that lets online shoppers turn their homes into virtual showrooms.

An experience where they can try out clothing, footwear, eyewear, accessories, make up, all on themselves- like they would at a store, directly from the comfort of their homes.

Right now, it’s become even important for retailers and brands to step up and merge these two worlds. Probably why we’re seeing a huge spike in brands rushing to adopt 3D and AR. Here at Designhubz, we didn’t expect for the outbreak to directly translate into demand for our technology. But with or without the coronavirus, luckily we were prepared.

By leveraging our tech, retail brands are looking to implement 3D and AR product views on their website, app or any other online sales channel- quickly and with minimal effort. And that's exactly where our forte lies.

Our tech, deployment and success teams are proud to play a role in minimizing the challenges facing retailers right now. If you’re curious as to what our tech looks like, you can explore our 3d and AR tech, live on the IKEA shopping website here.

2. Helping customers make informed buying decisions, without any exposure

With a try-before-you-buy online shopping experience, comes huge advantages for the end shopper. After all, the customer comes first and we cannot stress enough upon how important it is to empower them. Especially at this time when they’re proactively isolating public shopping spaces.

Another factor to consider here is the huge difference between the conversion rates that brick-and-mortars see(20-40%) as compared to ecommerce websites(2-4%). Both these bottlenecks arise from the fact that customers can actually see an item before purchasing it in a physical store. However, with the physical channel out of the equation, brands need to evaluate how they can empower customers to make informed purchase decisions online.

And what better way to do it than 3D and AR enabled shopping? It’s a win-win for both brands and customers, as they can buy with confidence without having to expose themselves to a physical environment which might be at risk.

The best part? They don’t need to download a specific app which eventually ends up in the uninstalled list. Instead, brands can activate AR experiences created with our tech directly to their websites for shoppers to enjoy.

3. Helping brands activate fast, with the most advanced digitization process

Now typically, creating and deploying 3D and AR experiences could take weeks or months- depending on the platform or technology one uses. After all, converting physical inventory to immersive product views is no easy feat.

But not with us.

Equipped with fully automated robotic rigs, our process can convert physical products into 3D and AR views in a matter of minutes. With us, the process looks like this:

• We send our automated robotic rigs (100% sanitized for peace of mind) to our clients, completely free of cost
• They place their physical products in front of the rig
• The rig then automatically scans the products and creates 3D and AR renderings which also automatically gets uploaded into client’s Designhubz account
• Brands can then login to their account to view these product views. Each product view comes with their own code snippet and URL to share on social channels, etc. From there, brands only need to copy paste the snippets onto their product pages.

We’ve done our due diligence, and hands down we have the fastest and most advanced digitization process in the game. Want to leverage Designhubz and activate 3D and AR shopping on your website? Schedule a quick demo here.

Bottom Line

For the retail sector, this serves as a reminder that having a failsafe plan (and more) is crucial to stability in the face of unforeseen crisis. Now, time will tell how brands adapt and make themselves immune.

In the meantime, one can only hope that the global threat posed by the Coronavirus will be mitigated soon. If you think there are other ways in which brands and businesses can tackle the challenges they face, please don’t shy away from sharing them in the comments section.

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