Canadian direct-to-consumer (DTC), outside-furniture brand Yardistry, has doubled its ecommerce orders year-on-year by investing in its customer experience with 3D product visualisation. Yardistry specialises in outdoor, ready-to-assemble wood structure furniture, including outdoor gazebos, pavilions, and pergolas. Yardistry needed a way to visualise products at their exact scale, in customers’ own spaces, to help increase buyer confidence.
While the last few years have seen many buyers turn to online shopping, it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for customer or seller. 59% of ecommerce shoppers have lost trust after unsatisfactory experiences. Particularly for large purchases such as furniture, it’s vital that retailers can provide customers with access to all the information they need before clicking the “add-to-cart” button.
3D visualisations help customers be sure they are choosing the right product for them, first time, avoiding potential disappointment or costly returns for retailers. Customers can view a product within their chosen environment and have access to full 360 product views, which helps facilitate a deeper connection with the items.
Adoption of this technology is growing fast, with visualisation tools being taken up by nearly two-thirds (60%) of furniture firms to help promote revenue growth. However, this is still less common for outdoor furniture brands, somewhere Yardistry has found an opportunity to build a better customer experience. .
Imagining the product in the customers’ home space
While pictures are a good place to start, for many customers there is a desire to experience the true look, feel and dimensions of a product, particularly on bigger items.
This can put ecommerce-first companies at a competitive disadvantage as customers are unsure which product is best for them. Yardistry was keen to bridge this conversion barrier.
By utilising Cylindo AR, Yardistry enables customers to visualise the actual scale of the product in their own space. The product has a QR on each web page that online customers can scan, offering a seamless buyer journey.
The quality of the product imagery is also a key factor. Photo-realistic product images and full 360 views, with spin, zoom and inspect functions make the AR experience as life-like and versatile as possible.
The fact that the technology is website-native adds further convenience for consumers, as there is no need to download and navigate a new app on their mobile.
Reducing additional business spend and boosting marketing efforts
From a business perspective, the use of 3D visualisation and digitally created imagery has allowed for a much more efficient, higher quality asset development process. In the past, Yardisty’s photography teams often had to travel to manufacturing sites to produce product imagery.
With 3D visualisation enabling the marketing team to create photorealistic generated imagery, now Yardistry’s photography efforts can be placed on creative products – saving overall company time and spend. It’s also made it much easier to showcase accessories, with convenient switches to “toggle” these on or off in the visualisations.
The Yardistry team has also included its visualisations in some of its marketing touch points. The brand’s homepage has a clear call to action to explore a product with Cylindo AR, and the team has plans to include this imagery with Google Ads in the future.
Building trust within the consumer journey
Within this rapidly evolving landscape of retail and ecommerce, where customers are demanding more from their platforms – 3D product visualisations are becoming a brilliant source of information and a way to build trust within this consumer journey. Yardistry has had instances where a product will not be live yet and requests are already coming through to the customer teams for the product to be visualised in 360 views. This clear demand is leading to business success, with the doubling of ecommerce sales year-on-year since using these tools on the website.
With consumer spending and business budgets alike remaining constrained, leveraging all touchpoints to enhance the brand experience is key to sales success, particularly in the ecommerce arena. Yardistry is continuing to explore new ways of integrating this technology throughout the whole sales funnel, reflecting and adapting to match fast-changing customer needs and expectations.
