12,500 products are now available to view and purchase at the online marketplace’s Australian department store, Myer.
Australian consumers can now head to the Myer department store through eBay in order to be able to enjoy a virtual reality shopping experience that has been created by the massive online marketplace.
In order to be able to take part in this VR experience, shoppers will need to wear Shopticals.
The Shopticals are special virtual reality shopping goggles, which are essentially an altered version of the cardboard viewer from Google. Over 100 products are already viewable in 3D, but the VR technology will take things to an entirely different level. In order to make sure that Australians are properly equipped to go shopping within the virtual reality environment, eBay is giving away 1,000 of the Shopticals every day until 20,000 have been distributed.
Consumers can also request a pair of their own Shopticals virtual reality shopping goggles online.
All consumers need to do is visit ebay.com.au/vr and they can request a pair of their own Shopticals. A spokesperson from eBay has explained that there is already an “incredible” demand for the VR goggles and the company is going to be broadening the ways in which it distributes them soon. Myer is among the most recent retail additions to the Australian eBay sellers.
That retailer was selected by eBay for its very first VR shopping launch partner due to the broad spectrum of products that Myer has to offer, said a spokesperson from eBay. She explained that “We wanted to make sure that the first time people shop in VR they can see a wide selection of brands and categories, and a department store felt like the best way to showcase breadth and depth of selection.”
In order to use the Shopticals for virtual reality shopping on Myer at eBay Australia, the consumer needs the eBay VR app, which is already available at Android and iOS. Once the headset is on, the shopper can move through the digital department store and look around at the large selection of various products that are available there.
Applications are beginning to lose out to mobile sites when it comes to consumer shopping behaviors.
According to some of the latest statistics that were presented in a report on a recent study, consumers are now visiting m-commerce websites more frequently than apps, though they are more likely to make an actual purchase using the application.
This suggests that brands hoping for the greatest mobile shopping success may need to focus on both channels.
This also suggests that the previously recommended decision for brands to place all of their concentration on mobile app development in order to succeed in m-commerce may no longer be the ideal path. This is because the majority of smartphone users would prefer to interact with stores on their devices using websites and not applications. This is particularly true when it comes to informing themselves about the brand, store, shop locations, and products, for example.
The study looked into the way that consumers use m-commerce in order to interact with brands.
It was conducted by ICM Research, which surveyed more than 1,300 smartphone owners. It asked them about their interaction with a rather limited sample of 13 different retailers, over their smartphones. Across 12 of those 13 retailers, the websites were the most commonly used mobile shopping option. The only exception, the last of those retailers, was eBay, where the app received the largest amount of traffic.
The company that experienced the smallest number of mobile app users was Boots. Only 8 percent of the smartphone users who interacted with that brand and took part in the study did so by way of the app. Comparatively, 65 percent of them used the mobile website for this purpose. The retailer, Next, known for its fashions, experienced the second lowest use of its app – 11 percent – when compared to the interactions over its mobile website – 62 percent.
On the other hand, eBay’s m-commerce app was used by 52 percent of the respondents, whereas 35 percent of the respondents said that they interacted with that brand over their mobile browsers. Jamie Belnikoff, associate director at ICM Research, pointed out that the degree to which consumers seemed to prefer websites to apps surprised him.
