Online garden retail – how can you drive sales through online visualisation of customers’ ideas?
Problem faced
The main goal for this development was to create an easy-to-use tool that would help enhance the sales process by helping customers with their buying decisions by converting their ideas into visual plans. It should drive the desire to buy and give peace of mind and reassurance that the planned layout will work. More than that, we took up the challenge to:
- Encourage customers to explore more products: to choose from the company's entire stock range, interact with them and learn more about them before even visiting the store, and order all items direct from a garden plan that is linked to an online shop
- Reduce the amount of no-fits and return products: Customers should be able to make sure that the desired products will fit within their garden space before buying them. That will reduce the amount of returns, especially from those who didn't do their measurements before purchase
- Discover customers' hidden preferences: to find out more about customer requirements and habits by looking at the designs they make. This would give the opportunity to collect statistics about the typical garden dimensions used and most wanted products. This information can greatly influence product offering.
Solution developed
Virtual Window is a online planning tool enabling quick and efficient visualisation of a garden plan from 2D to 3D. It allows customers to view products online, change their garden setting and create exciting new designs from an extensive library of ideas.
The image on the lef is a real picture, the image on the right is a view from the online planning tool.
The tool is capable to being integrated directly with online shops. The entire software is written in Macromedia Flash, so there is no need for any downloads or installations.
Potential buyers can use Virtual Window - garden planning tool on a website - to place their chosen items (summer houses, sheds, paving, garden furniture or playcentres) in the garden layout.
What is more, they can order all the items direct from their garden plan. Customers are not only able to plan the layout with the garden items, but they can also visualise it. Users have the facility to zoom in and rotate items in order to examine the garden from different viewpoints, as they would in real life.
The business advantages:
- Enhances your sales process by helping customers with their buying decisions. The tool has a customer centred design, allowing customers to convert their ideas into images, to artificially plan, calculate and measure and visualise their plans. It is easy-to-use, it drives the desire to buy and gives a peace of mind and reassurance that the planned layout will work.
- Presents your products during planning and visualisation. Customers can choose products from the company's entire stock range, interact with them and learn more about them before they even visit your store, they can order all items direct from a garden plan that is linked to an online shop.
- Reduces the number of no-fits and return products. Customers can make sure that the desired products will fit within their garden space before buying them. That will reduce the amount of returns, especially from those who did not do their measurements before purchase.
- Learn what your customers really want. You can find out more about your customers' requirements and habits by looking at the designs they make. You can find out about the typical garden dimensions used and most used products. This information can greatly influence your product offering (hide)
- Identify customers for future marketing campaigns. Thanks to required registration when customers save their garden designs, work in progress is never lost.
- Build strong brand and customer loyalty in the world of e-commerce. Identify the products customers are more likely to buy and the ones that do not meet their needs, keep customers longer on your website and have more returning to the website to use the tool again. And satisfied customers are likely to recommend the tool to others.
- Virtual Window is very easy and quick to implement and use. The webpage would be part of your existing website, so no need for software download and installation.
For paving calculation and quotation tool see our Paving Toool