When you are in a clothing store you can try things on before you buy them and see how you look in them in a mirror. In a furniture store you can see and feel the merchandise before purchasing anything. Unfortunately, no consumer has any such similar abilities when shopping on line, that is, until now.
Based in Tel Aviv, Cimagine Media and yRuler are working with Liverpool based Shop Direct to promote new virtual shopping software which will allow consumers to test out products on line before making purchases. Shoppers will be able to get a visualization of how items such as furniture or appliances and even toys will actually look when placed inside their homes.
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The technology works by letting people compare the sizes of items for sale to what they already own. This is done through the cameras that people already have on their computers, tablets and smart phones. A person takes a picture of their surroundings and then an image of the product is added to that picture so the customer can see how it fits in to their surroundings.
Shop Direct’s e commerce director, Jonathan Wall said, “We were introduced to Cimagine and yRuler by the UK Israel Tech Hub at the British Embassy while on a research trip to Tel Aviv in 2013. Each company had invented an innovative technology that had the potential to improve the shopping experience for our customers. Cimagine was in the early stages of developing its augmented reality app when we started working with the team.
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“When we first put the technology in front of customers in our user experience lab, only a proportion could understand how to operate it properly. We worked with the team to identify the challenges that customers were facing and, in the final round of testing, every customer could easily work out how to access and use the technology. It’s that kind of partnership approach that we’re looking to develop with other emerging start-ups.”
Established in 2012, Cimagine Media’s mission is to develop the most usable augmented reality platform for home and office use. They offer an innovative solution for retailers that augments commerce for optimal consumer engagement and their platform is omni channel, providing a consistent consumer experience whether buying on line or in a store.
According to the claims of Cimagine, the new technology cuts out the need to place markers on the floor and is the“world’s first truly markerless augmented reality app.”
The CEO and co founder of Cimagine, Yoni Nevo, has over fifteen years of experience in business development, marketing, strategy, product management and software engineering. He previously worked at ECI and Amdocs. He has both a BA in computer science and an MBA in marketing and finance, both with honors, from Tel Aviv University.
In a statement on Shop Direct’s web site Nevo said, “Thanks to the usability lab testing, we learned that having the most realistic 3D visualization technology is not enough to create a great user experience. Shop Direct’s team encouraged us to speed up the introduction of our markerless capabilities and provided crucial feedback that resulted in an intuitive visualization solution that is launched at a click of a button. Working with Shop Direct has two-fold value – being both a customer and a real partner.”
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Based in Tel Aviv, yRuler offers on line marketers a platform which enables them to provide a personal experience to every visitor through leveraging their existing product images.
Its founder and CEO, Eliad Inbar, said this about working with Shop Direct. “The work process with Shop Direct has been amazingly efficient and smooth. The team embedded yRuler’s one-line script in no time and pilot provisioning took less than an hour. Thanks to the optimization effort by Shop Direct, the yRuler button was redesigned and relocated on-site, resulting in an 8% click-through rate within the first month of the pilot. In addition, we received detailed feedback from the usability team, which enabled us to further optimize the yRuler experience for Shop Direct’s customers.”
Shop Direct is a multi brand English on line retailer established in 2005. The new software is currently being tested at Shop Direct’s user experience lab.
