Last updated on May 15th, 2024
Its very easy for brands to get lost into the sparkling symptoms of Augmented Reality, especially when it comes to creating wow experience for product marketing experiences. But often, the most important question is not been asked - "How to integrate, a new technology like WebAR, successfully into a company's digital landscape?".
It is more important for ecommerce comapnies to consider AR as a service before adopting inside an organization landscape. Let's dive inside to find the dos and don'ts which can help you to onboard WebAR for your business to scale the user engagement, lead conversion and reduce product return rate in general.
Major Challenges while Adopting AR
When customers get past the initial AR potential discovery joy phase, the next challenge comes to them to decide on how to start adopting AR for their brands. Unfortunately it is not something like an add-on to add on your existing CRM tool. In an ideal case, the AR app can somewhat ends up accessing the company's CRM tool, user database, product inventory warehouse, marketing platforms and lot more if you want to build a detailed experience.
1️⃣ Microsoft HoloLens AR (AR Headsets in general)
To begin with, companies need to buy expensive HoloLens along with hiring developers to build custom applications. Then buy more HoloLens to showcase it to end users, perhaps in showrooms - a very costly affair from the day one. ROI is not always very promising if it is not aligned to very niche specific industries.
2️⃣ Custom AR apps for Android and iOS
Either companies need to spend months of time on effort on hiring designers, developers, testers or they can offshore the projects to any app development agency. Then, if it is not Pokemon Go or IKEA app, there's a possibility that very less people will download them for few seconds of experience. Especially when we live in an age where people prefer to use a handful of daily useful apps in their smartphones. Adding tons of new apps every now and then is something not to consider as an effective user strategy - even if your apps could be the chosen one. Recurrent addition of new features, more products/services, bug fixing etc. are some of the concurrent budget issues while managing apps in a long run - let alone the fact that you have to do it both for Android & iOS everytime, then upload new versions in app stores and wait for days before getting them published.
Oh! We forgot to mention one more thing - even if you publish the latest bug-free, best user experience AR apps - there is no gurantee that user is going to update the app right away.
3️⃣ Lack of Security for AR integration
While the standalone apps look promising and quite easy to integrate with a company's core tools like CRMs, often they are not very high standard on security. Especially during a time of war, where cyber attacks are all time high, such an attack can demolish a company to ground, via a small loophole like AR apps with open vulnerabilities. Building an app from scratch is itself a challenge. Adding tons of security guidelines is just a set of headaches you have to bear. If your company sits within EU, GDPR could be a standard compliance law against which you cannot even argue.
How Web based Augmented Reality makes it easy
3D product visualization on the web needs very little learning from the user side. The interactivity comes naturally while browsing which is a great feature to engage potential customers for a very long time (up to 85x time or more than any traditional markteting approach). Launching those 3D products from the website, directly at home is an amazing experience and WebAR can enable that easily.
The associated cost for adopting WebAR is fractional (less then 90% or more) than the traditional AR initiatives described above. New founded online ecommerce companies who are tight on budget can start experimenting using a few hundreds dollars before scaling it massivey (even if the cost is lower than some traditional SEO consultancy packages).
For example, furniture companies often roll out new sets of products every few months and almost every quarter. This is quite an effort to cope up with the website update, photoshoots, preparing marketing materials and many more things constantly. Adding WebAR can sound like an additional task to bear.
Here's the good news. At Marvin XR, we help our customers with end to end services. This means during new product design roll out, we help to create the 3D assets (from 2-4 images of the product - and they need not to be photoshopped) to create the WebAR and make it ready for integration (we have integration tool too). Marketers only need to add them to the product page just like adding an extra image to the product image carousal. Believe it or not but it's really that easy!
AR-a-a-S - The New Business Trend
Software as a service (SaaS) is the most commonly used option for businesses in the cloud market. The reason? It’s easily accessible – all you need is an internet connection and a browser – and it’s hands-off. The SaaS delivery model requires vendors to manage all the technical issues – meaning customers don’t need to lean on their in-house IT expertise. Common types of cloud computing services include the following:
✅ Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
✅ Platform as a service (PaaS)
✅ Software as a service (SaaS)
Web based Augmented Reality is in reality: ✅ AR as a service (ARaaS)
Ecommerce business can simply subscribe to AR cloud solutions and build the first AR experience with low code/no code editors. Easy to launch AR campaigns and connect to company platform tools with APIs. Thus WebAR solves some of the most challenging issues for the customer companies:
No management of physical infrastructure, no overhead cost
Same quality AR experience without allocating huge budget
No cost of hiring team of software developers every time
Cloud Security ensures the data protection and integration
Instant publication helps to modify any running AR campaign within seconds
Instead of opening CRM to exernal product, import campaign data - it's safe
Summary
WebAR as a subscription model enables the customers to decide whether they need to ramp up or down their budget based on the current needs. A flexible budget is always beneficial for companies to experiment.
A great product offering to be sold quickly in the market. When targeted to the right audience, WebAR based online experience can play magic to increase the brand awareness, lead conversion, sales and loyalty. This is a perfect time to start adoping AR for brands. With WebAR, even SMBs can compete against the enterprises in terms of user experience. 2024 is going to be epic with more adoption of WebAR.
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