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Chapter 1:
Visual Commerce: A Guide for eCommerce Brands and Retailers

Chapter 1:  Visual Commerce: A Guide for eCommerce Brands and Retailers
What is Visual Commerce?
Why are Online Retailers and Brands Investing in Visual Commerce Platform Strategies?
Types of Visual Commerce Strategies
Utilizing High-Resolution 2D and 3D Product Photos
Making Navigation Visually Intuitive
Incorporating User-Generated Content
How 3D and AR Technology Enhance Visual Commerce
Implement Your Visual Commerce Strategy Easily with VNTANA

Chapter 2: 5 eCommerce Merchandising Strategies that Drive Online Sales
What is eCommerce Merchandising?
Comparing eCommerce Merchandising vs. Traditional Merchandising
Five eCommerce Merchandising Strategies That Drive Sales
Add 3D and AR to Your eCommerce Merchandising Strategy with VNTANA

Chapter 3: An eCommerce Visual Merchandising Checklist for Online Brands and Retailers
What Is eCommerce Visual Merchandising?
An eCommerce Visual Merchandising Checklist: Seven Essential Items
Add 3D and AR to Your eCommerce Visual Merchandising Strategy with Ease

Quick Answer: Visual commerce is the use of rich, interactive visual content — including 3D product models, augmented reality, 360-degree spin, and video — to replicate the in-store shopping experience online and drive ecommerce conversion. Unlike traditional product photography, visual commerce content is interactive, letting shoppers engage with products rather than passively viewing them, which reduces purchase uncertainty and return rates. VNTANA’s visual commerce platform gives enterprise brands the tools to produce, manage, and publish 3D and AR content across every digital sales channel at scale.

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Chapter 1: Visual Commerce: Enhance Your Graphics to Increase Your Sales

Visual commerce helps eCommerce brands increase digital sales by leveraging visual content such as photos, videos, 3D, and Augmented Reality (AR) to create an immersive customer experience. Strategic use of these technologies can help you deliver more realistic product previews which promote engagement and boost eCommerce sales.

This three-part guide will walk you through what you need to know to start putting visual commerce to use to increase your marketing and sales results:

  • In Chapter 1, we’ll define visual commerce, explore why brands invest in it, identify the main types of visual commerce strategies, and explain how 3D and AR can enhance visual eCommerce campaigns.
  • In Chapter 2, we’ll share eCommerce merchandising strategiesyou can use to put the power of visual commerce to use.
  • In Chapter 3, we’ll provide an eCommerce visual merchandisingchecklist you can use to help you put visual commerce strategies into practice.

What is Visual Commerce?

Visual commerce is an eCommerce strategy that optimizes graphics technology to provide more realistic product previews that promote customer engagement and sales. Graphics elements that support visual commerce strategies include:

  • High-quality photos
  • 360-degree walkthroughs
  • Interactive 3Dmodels
  • Augmented Reality (AR) virtual try-ons

These visual technologies grab online shoppers’ attention, make it easier for a digital customer to navigate online stores, and allow buyers to experience lifelike previews of products from the convenience of their mobile device or PC. Compelling visuals promote a better virtual shopping experience, higher engagement, and higher sales.

Why are Online Retailers and Brands Investing in Visual Commerce Platform Strategies?

Visual commerce platform adoption has grown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by financial news agency NewsOrigins. Pandemic lockdowns accelerated a trend toward digital shopping, which was already in motion. As shoppers spent less time in brick-and-mortar stores and less time physically interacting with products, delivering compelling digital product previews became critical for online sales.

Even though shoppers have started returning to brick-and-mortar stores, visual commerce is vital in driving online sales and persuading potential customers to browse online inventory. Customers who get a realistic feel for products online feel confident they are making informed purchase decisions, increasing their likeliness to purchase. These customers are also less likely to abandon shopping carts and less likely to return products. Using 3D visual commerce strategies, companies can double their conversion rates while seeing returns fall by 40%.

Types of Visual Commerce Strategies

As visual commerce platforms have grown, brands have developed several effective marketing strategies for deploying this emerging technology. These include:

Utilizing High-Resolution 2D and 3D Product Photos

High-quality product photos can strengthen your visual merchandising strategy by making your eCommerce website’s product pages more immersive and compelling. Methods range from the simpler to the more advanced:

  • Crawl: Provide high-quality 2D photos which visitors can browse at their own pace to study product details, zoom in on features, and visualize product uses.
  • Walk: Stitch together 2D photos into a 360-degree view, letting shoppers see your product from all angles, including angles they couldn’t see in a physical store.
  • Run: Bring your products to life with 3Dimages and AR effects, which let shoppers see products from multiple perspectives and preview how they would look being worn or used in their home.

Each of these methods has its own best uses and best practices. For example, 3D and AR effects can be used to set up strategic product placement of items you want to showcase on your website. Take advantage of these technologies to promote your hottest merchandise where visitors are most likely to see it.

Making Navigation Visually Intuitive

Visual commerce technology lets you make your website visually intuitive to navigate, promoting more clicks and engagement. You can use visual features to build an easy-to-navigate website structure and search bars that let customers browse products on your website.

Making the most of this method requires categorizing your content clearly and logically and tagging product attributes. The VNTANA hotspots tagging feature lets you tag product images to add AR callout text which users can check out as they browse.

Incorporating User-Generated Content

Combining visual commerce with social media marketing offers a powerful way to engage customers by incorporating User-Generated Content (UGC) from social followers and influencers into eCommerce websites. For example, you can repost content from your customers’ organic social media posts or share customer photos from reviews and testimonials. Showcasing these online interactions serves as social proof that customers love your product and can influence online shoppers’ purchase decisions.

How 3D and AR Technology Enhance Visual Commerce

3D and AR offer some of the most engaging applications of visual commerce technology by enabling highly immersive product visualization. You can use these tools to:

  • Engage users with interactive 3D models in real-time, which let customers see products from multiple angles as if they were manipulating the object or walking around it, including images of what they’d look like wearing an item.
  • Use 3D in combination with AR to allow customers to view products against the backdrop of their physical environment in their home or yard using their smartphone or tablet.
  • Rapidly create 3D product images from 2D renders, eliminating the need for physical photo shoots.
  • Provide immersive user experiences which give deeper product understanding, bridging the gap between online shopping and the in-store experience.

These applications make 3D and AR an effective way to deliver digital customers a shopping experience that combines the immersive quality of in-store shopping with the convenience of shopping from home.

Implement Your Visual Commerce Strategy Easily with VNTANA

Implementing a visual eCommerce strategy requires using a suitable visual commerce platform. VNTANA’s 3D and AR Commerce platform is designed to get you up and running quickly.

Our 3D web viewer can be used on any site and includes built-in AR support, which works across all devices. Patented optimization algorithms ensure that your 3D images load fast without compromising image quality, avoiding slow downloads, which can cost you customers. We use Google to index your images for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), ensuring that your products appear in search engine results. Our customers enjoy a 100% increase in conversion rates, a 60%  increase in Average Order Value (AOV), and a 40% drop in returns.

Schedule a demo to see how it works. Or read on to learn more about how you can leverage visual eCommerce by using eCommerce merchandising strategies.

Chapter 2: How to Use eCommerce Merchandising to Increase Digital Sales

Digital eCommerce merchandising strategies use the visual commerce tools described in the last chapter to maximize sales conversions for online retailers and brands. You can dramatically enhance shoppers’ eCommerce experience by combining compelling 3D graphics and immersive Augmented Reality (AR) experiences with best practices for eCommerce merchandising.

Here we’ll show you how to do it. First, we’ll define eCommerce merchandising and highlight how eCommerce merchandising strategy compares with traditional merchandising in brick and mortar stores. Then, we’ll walk you through five proven eCommerce merchandising strategies that can help you increase online engagement and drive sales. 

What is eCommerce Merchandising?

eCommerce merchandising is a digital marketing strategy that optimizes the appearance and structure of products on an eCommerce website to help customers easily find the right products, learn about its features, and confidently make a purchase decision. Beyond ensuring a positive aesthetic appearance, eCommerce merchandising focuses on reaching potential customers at every stage of their customer journey and optimizing their path to conversion once they land on your site. A solid online merchandising strategy will also address the knowledge gap and hesitation that users experience when shopping online due to not being able to experience the product in a physical store by providing an immersive virtual shopping environment using 3D product visualization and AR try-ons.

Comparing eCommerce Merchandising vs. Traditional Merchandising

While eCommerce merchandising shares many general similarities with traditional merchandising, some critical differences distinguish these sales approaches:

  • Where traditional merchandising relies on getting shoppers into stores, eCommerce merchandising depends on attracting website visitors to eCommerce sites.
  • Traditional shopping experience depends on store atmosphere, while eCommerce shopping experience depends on web design features such as mobile-friendly design, user-friendly navigation, and engaging graphics.
  • In traditional stores, physical product placement defines which products customers are most likely to see, while in online stores, product placement can be customized based on online behavior.
  • An in-store shopper forms impressions of products and makes purchasing decisions based on what they can see, touch, read, and learn from the staff. In contrast, online shoppers make buying decisions primarily based on what visual and textual information they can obtain online from product images, product descriptions, product reviews, and social proof.
  • Retail stores rely on staff to recommend new products and product add-ons before customer checkout.  eCommerce businesses develop cross-selling and upselling opportunities based on users’ online behaviors, recently viewed products, and recently purchased products.

These differences underscore why web design and graphics quality drive eCommerce sales. Digital shoppers make purchase decisions based on their experience of your website and how your site presents your products.

Five eCommerce Merchandising Strategies That Drive Sales

Your eCommerce merchandising sales results depend heavily on your web design and your use of graphics. Here are five essential strategies to follow:

1. Prioritize Your Website User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)

User experience refers to the level of satisfaction your website customers feel after visiting, while user interface refers to the design elements contributing to the user experience. Both these elements contribute to the effectiveness of your eCommerce merchandising strategy. For best results:

  • Optimize your home page, category pages, and product pages to highlight your highest converting products.
  • Lay out navigational features to make it easy for online shoppers to see how to find products and product categories.
  • Include a search bar to help shoppers find what they’re looking for.

Testing your UX and UI will help you verify that your customers are getting a positive experience when they visit your site. You can use heat map analysis to see what customers do when they visit your site so you can make improvements.

2. Categorize Your Products

To help customers find a specific product, you need a sound content management system to organize your product categories. Group your products by tagging them with characteristics such as brand, product type, color, size, features, and uses. This makes it easier for customers to search your inventory and enables your site to suggest customized product recommendations based on visitor behavior.

3. Invest in Compelling Visuals

Shoppers’ online experience of your product revolves around visual elements. Compelling visuals can help you make your products more appealing and differentiate your brand identity from your competitors.

Capture shoppers’ attention with high-quality visual commerce graphics tools such as 3D, 360-degree, interactive images which let customers see your products from multiple angles, try out products against live backgrounds and read callout captions for more information. The VNTANA 3D Web Viewer makes it easy for you to add 3D to your site for viewing by customers on any device. See our visual merchandising checklist on what to include to make your site visually compelling.

4. Provide In-Depth Product Information

As customers look at your site’s graphics, they’ll have questions requiring text to answer. This makes it critical that your graphics include accompanying product descriptions that give shoppers the information they need about features and benefits, which can’t be conveyed through photos alone. The VNTANA 3D Web Viewer hotspot feature lets you add interactive buttons to 3D images so shoppers can see callouts with important textual details.

5. Create Immersive Customer Experiences

The more immersive you can make your eCommerce store’s online shopping experience, the more it will engage customers and the more prone they’ll be to buy. You can make digital experiences more immersive by leveraging 3D and augmented reality tools to combine the realism of 3D with the ability of AR to merge digital and real experiences.

For example, you can use a 3D commerce model to create a highly realistic digital replica of your product which can be viewed from multiple angles. You then can use AR to let customers virtually try on an item such as clothing or shoes and see how a selfie photo or video of themselves looks when they’re wearing your product. Using a similar strategy, you can allow customers to see how a digital 3D replica of your product would look in their room or yard.

Add 3D and AR to Your eCommerce Merchandising Strategy with VNTANA

Effective use of eCommerce marketing strategies depends on a technology platform that can support website design best practices and visual commerce tools such as 3D and AR. VNTANA 3D and AR eCommerce solutions help you optimize your site for online sales by providing content management tools that make it easy for visitors to find your products and immersive images to capture customer attention.

Our 3D web viewer works for any site and comes with AR support compatible with all devices. Optimization algorithms let online visitors load your 3D images fast without losing image quality, preventing slow downloads, which can cut sales. We index your images for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure your products appear in search engine results. Our clients see a 100% growth in conversion rates, a 60% Average Order Value (AOV) increase, and a 40% return reduction.

Set up a demo to see it in action. Or read on to see our eCommerce visual merchandising checklist, showing you exactly how to implement the strategies from this chapter.

Quick Answer: Ecommerce visual merchandising is the practice of presenting products online in ways that maximize engagement and drive purchase — through strategic use of images, video, 3D models, and page layout. Unlike physical retail, digital visual merchandising relies on rich media formats like 360-degree spin, interactive 3D viewers, and augmented reality to compensate for the inability to physically handle products. VNTANA’s platform gives ecommerce teams the tools to deploy 3D and AR product experiences that function as the digital equivalent of a store’s visual merchandising strategy.

Chapter 3: An eCommerce Visual Merchandising Checklist for Online Brands and Retailers

Successful eCommerce visual merchandising depends on following best practices and using suitable technology tools. In the previous chapters, we covered visual commerce and how you can use it to benefit your business by following eCommerce merchandising strategies. Here we’ll walk you through exactly what you need to do to implement an effective eCommerce visual merchandising plan.

After reviewing just what eCommerce visual merchandising is, we’ll outline seven essential items you need to have in place for effective visual commerce. We’ll also show you how to leverage technology to implement eCommerce visual merchandising best practices.

What Is eCommerce Visual Merchandising?

eCommerce visual merchandising is a digital marketing strategy that optimizes the placement and display of compelling graphics on an eCommerce site to attract customers, improve the virtual shopping experience, and increase engagement. Much like the carefully arranged window displays of a brick and mortar store, visual site merchandising serves as a potential customer’s first look at your brand identity. To effectively convey an eCommerce brand’s story,  web designers use tools such as high-quality 2D images, 3D models, and augmented reality (AR) interactive shopping features.

These online merchandising tools provide enhanced product visualization for shoppers, delivering a more realistic, immersive, and engaging online shopping experience that mirrors the customer experience of a physical store. These immersive customer experiences drive sales and lower returns. Incorporating visual commerce features such as 3D and AR in your online store can yield as much as 100% growth in conversion rates, with a 60% increase in average shopping cart purchase value and a 40% reduction in returns.

An eCommerce Visual Merchandising Checklist: Seven Essential Items

To do effective visual merchandising online, following best practices for website design and graphics display is essential. Use the visual merchandising guide below to help you optimize your site for eCommerce.

1. Website Homepage

Good visual merchandising websites start with a properly designed homepage. To optimize your homepage for conversion, appeal to online shoppers by:

  • Highlighting best-sellers and organizing products by theme: for example, highlighting personas, special designer collections, and seasonal collections
  • Driving engagement with interactive content: incorporate video or interactive 3D models
  • Highlight sales and promotions: encourage shoppers to buy with strategic emphasis on your sales and promotional campaigns

2. Category Pages and Product Pages

Your category and product pages help your customers find what they’re looking for and make purchasing decisions. To optimize these pages for conversion, appeal to online shoppers by:

  • Using high-quality product images, such as 3D, 360-degree, interactive product images
  • Emphasizing details in product descriptions: the VNTANA 3D web viewerhotspots tool makes it easy for customers to hone in on key features visually
  • Helping shoppers understand your product with immersive 3Dand AR experiences

3. Page Layout and Speed

You may lose sales and customers when shoppers can’t load or navigate your page quickly. To deliver a great user experience, you need a fast-loading page that is easy to navigate. Making your page mobile-friendly is especially critical, so smartphone users can quickly access it and find what they’re looking for. VNTANA uses a patented algorithm to optimize website 3D images from your site so that they load quickly for customers, avoiding the slow downloads which can result from poorly designed graphics management.

4. Social Proof

Online shoppers trust other customers’ opinions, and social proof can influence their buying decisions. You can provide social proof by showcasing user-generated content on your site, product, and sales pages. Include elements such as:

  • Customer testimonials
  • Product reviews
  • Social media mentions

5. Site Navigation and Search Bar

To ensure that customers can find the products they want to buy, developing an easy-to-follow site structure for your eCommerce website is essential. Have a clearly defined navigation menu split into logical categories and subcategories. Remember that you want the user to get to where they need to go in the fewest clicks possible.

Search bars are a great tool to make online shopping easier through search filters like color, size, brand, and price. Make sure your products are categorized and tagged appropriately. The VNTANA platform includes a content management system to help you tag and organize 3D and AR content so customers can find items quickly.

6. Product Recommendations

Customized recommendations based on shopper behavior can encourage customers to buy more per purchase. To boost more sales, promote products that work together as a set. Suggested combinations can be personalized based on the customer’s browser behavior and purchase history. Multiply the impact of online recommendations by leveraging data from website activity into personalized email marketing campaigns.

7. Checkout Page Optimizations

Your checkout page design forms another critical component of your visual merchandising strategy. Making it easy for shoppers to check out encourages sales. You also can use your checkout page design to promote upsells and cross-sells that drastically increase Average Order Value (AOV) and revenue. This can be as simple as showing a pop-up notification before the user checks out to encourage impulse buys of related products.

Add 3D and AR to Your eCommerce Visual Merchandising Strategy with Ease

To get the most out of the best practices outlined in our checklist, you’ll need an eCommerce visual merchandising platform suitable for supporting enhanced graphics. VNTANA 3D and AR eCommerce solutions enable your website to deploy visual merchandising in minimal time for maximum benefit.

Our 3D web viewer can be integrated with any site and comes equipped with built-in AR support compatible with all devices your customers use. Our optimization algorithms let shoppers load 3D images fast without lowering image quality, preventing slow downloads that can turn buyers away. We use Google to index your images for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), ensuring that your products appear in search engine results. Our customers enjoy doubled conversion rates, increases in AOV, and drops in returns. Schedule a demo to see eCommerce visual merchandising in action and experience how VNTANA can help you make more sales online.