Amazon Showroom has launched on the Amazon US site and moblie app to enable visual shopping for living room furniture. Pictured is a standard living room but you can swap and change the wall colours and a choice of different shades of wood or carpet flooring to match your home and then choose a sofa, chair, coffee table, side table, lamp, picture and rug.
To change selections you simply click on the product of interest and in the side bar you’ll find alternatives to choose from. Click on an alternative and it’ll replace the item in the room so you can customise the look ready to purchase.
Naturally once you’ve made your selections you can make an instant purchase of the items by adding them to your cart. You can also save your selections to revisit in the future.
As you might expect, products are heavily weighted towards those sold and fulfilled by Amazon. In the random selection we chose, 4 out of the 7 products were sold by Amazon but still 3 items would have been sales going to third party merchants on the Amazon marketplace.
The aim of Amazon Showroom isn’t to reproduce your living room online, it’s simply to give a photo-realistic impression of how a selection of items will appear when placed together. Currently the only room available to customise is a living room, but doubtless if it proves to be successful in driving sales Amazon will build other rooms such as bedrooms, studies and dining rooms or kitchens.
Amazon haven’t revealed how items are selected, but with infinite scroll, there doesn’t appear to be any hard limits on how many choices are available for customers to choose. That means that if your items match their search criteria there’s a reasonable chance that your products could be included.
You can experiment with Amazon Showroom here.
4 Responses
I like this idea, and it would be perfect in the rare circumstance where I was replacing everything in my living room.
What would make this more useful is if I could move the objects around – so I can directly compare (for example) the lamp and table next to each other.
shoot, i was looking into this kind of thing for the website a few months ago, and started doing trials with 3d capture and stitching tools.
i didn’t want to invest the big bucks in something that might never actually get used, and the free trials of cheap solutions were not yielding great results.
the concept is pretty obviously going to result in sales, furniture is one of they things that people need a more tactile shopping experience, and short of a physical shop this tech will help bridge the gap, but i found its not cheap or easy to start off.
even just taking the photos (for the cheap software at least) takes an hour or two for a small, basic, piece of furniture, anything with complex angles and overhangs could be much longer. and then triple that for the cropping/editiing times.
do you have any more details on what amazon’s system is working with? can anyone register and provide their own 3d files, if so in what format? or is there some amazon-specific software they’ve released (he asks, hoping there’s a quick and simple video stitching solution they amazon whizzkids have knocked up)?