Amazon AR Retail: Company May Sell Furniture Using Augmented Reality, Report Says

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have slowly making their way into the mainstream, especially over the past year. The technologies were earlier gaming-centric but now, it seems that companies such as retail giant Amazon could make them intrinsic to everyday activities such as shopping, according to a new report.

New York Times reported Saturday, citing anonymous sources, that Amazon was considering using AR and VR to provide customers a better feel of products they would generally be wary of buying online, such as furniture and home appliances. The company could actually create a physical store for the items and use the technology to give users a virtual tour of it.

“We are always thinking about new ways to serve customers, but thinking is different than planning,” Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesman told the Times.

Read: Amazon Might Open A Bookstore In New York City

Amazon has been trying to diversify its retail offerings. In 2015, it opened physical bookstores and in 2016, it came out with the Amazon Go grocery store concept which lets customers pick whatever they want and walk out the doors, while scanners and sensors detect the purchases and charge them for whatever they picked without any check-out queues.

If the company goes the AR way, it wouldn’t be the first company to do so. Lowe’s already uses VR to showcase to customers how to use its products for home improvement.

It also uses AR in its app, which lets customers navigate their way through its stores.

As far as Amazon’s AR venture goes, it could either be an idea that the company puts its weight behind and changes the way people shop on its platform, or it could be one of the many experiments the company is doing to diversify its retail model, like Prime Air drone delivery and Dash Buttons.

“What appears to be clear is they haven’t yet zeroed in on a format they’re willing to massively scale. This is a company that the moment it figures out something that works, it puts nuclear energy behind it,” Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business told the Times.