New app from home furniture giant lets you visualise how your home would look before you buy the goods.
Lamented for being slow to arrive with a mobile shopping app, IKEA has actually changed the game with a new augmented reality platform that lets you visualise before you buy. And the question now is, will mobile shopping ever be the same?
The move – quite revolutionary in terms of augmented reality (AR) technology – also suggests a shift by IKEA away from pure retail.
The new app allows customers to shop remotely for products they can visualise in the context of their own homes.
This is a big move away from the traditional experience of navigating the vast warehouses and wrestling giant flatpacks onto trolleys and hoping it all turns out well.
The company is also testing the creation of smaller urban locations that carry a fraction of its overall line-up.
The new app allows users to visualise how their homes could be furnished with IKEA products by inputting the dimensions and choosing from different tastes and life stages.
They can then order those products through the app.
“It is a completely new experience,” Barbara Martin Coppola, chief digital officer at IKEA, was quoted by Reuters in an interview. “The app is combined with the store experience, with the online experience.”
The app was originally launched as an AR app last year, but customers could not buy from it. That’s about to change and it could represent a new force in how AR combined with e-commerce will transform consumer buying trends.
The new app will allow users to point their phone at a chair or table to see other textures, colours or how it might look alongside other products.
The app will be launched first in France and the Netherlands and will be rolled out in IKEA’s top eight markets – including Germany, the US and China – by the end of the year.
The move by IKEA could prove to be prescient when you consider how companies like Facebook are also muscling in on the AR action.
Earlier this year Facebook acquired visual shopping and AI start-up GrokStyle. GrokStyle’s technology is integrated into IKEA’s mobile app and when a user takes a picture of a piece of furniture, the technology could match it to similar products that could be purchased online.
The future of commerce isn’t just fascinating. The future of commerce is mobile and visual.