The customer’s shopping experience heavily influences purchase decisions. A customer with a pleasant experience at your store is more likely to develop a positive association with shopping there and more likely to revisit. Navigating the store, however, can be challenging, especially in larger spaces with multiple aisles or departments. Mall navigation to find the store you’re looking for can also be a confusing and stressful experience for visitors.
Instore navigation is a system that helps customers find their way from point A to point B with specific directions. It makes finding the product they’re looking for, the exit door, the cash counter, or the trial room – an effortless experience by indicating the way so the customer is self-reliant.
Traditional methods of instore navigation have been – following physical signs, getting directions from kiosks, or asking representatives for assistance with directions.
With the popularity of smartphones, instore navigation is available at your fingertips – with apps holding extensively detailed maps.
ARway.ai is a web-based platform that utilizes cutting-edge AR technology to create an immersive experience for indoor navigation. Introducing augmented reality in retail with instore mapping technology has changed how customers navigate and shop.
The Common Hassles in Traditional Instore Navigation
Shopping malls, supermarkets, and large department stores tend to have massive and often complicated layouts that can be very overwhelming for customers. Due to signal obstructions, GPS proves ineffective in wayfinding indoors. Customers relying on physical signs and guidance from store personnel face some avoidable challenges. Let’s understand these from their perspective and uncover the problems associated with traditional instore navigation.
Subpar Customer Experience
The process of finding what you’re looking for is not direct. The customer first has to figure out where to look for directions, after searching for help with directions, then navigate to the destination they are looking for and only then start shopping. This time-consuming journey negatively affects the shopping experience and increases the risk of misreading maps, misunderstanding directions, and getting lost. Compared to smaller stores, the lack of continuous assistance and the additional effort and time spent getting what they need can be physically and mentally taxing.
Unnecessary Distractions
Rather than experiencing what the store offers and exploring different products and brands, customers spend a significant amount of time reading signs and maps to locate the products they are looking for. The complexity of navigation makes it an experience full of distractions.
Time Wastage
Operating wayfinding kiosks, searching for signs, and asking for directions are time-consuming. Even digital smartphone maps take time to be read as they do not pinpoint a customer’s location. Customers often have limited time to shop, and squandering away precious minutes just to navigate within the premises is a wasteful expenditure of time.
Privacy Disruption
According to data from Harvard Business Review, customers like to have more privacy in stores. Customers can be reluctant to approach and ask in-store salespersons for assistance, and the need to do so can adversely affect their shopping experience.
Sales Reduction
According to data from Retail Touchpoints, 67.3% of customers who leave stores empty-handed do so because they cannot find the product they need despite their availability. People find it challenging to locate the products they require despite the availability of signs and maps for navigation, which limits the store’s sales.
Redundant & Tedious Experience
Searching for your destination within the store can be very dull and tedious for customers and people who accompany customers, such as toddlers with their parents. The traditional methods of instore navigation are unengaging and not interesting.
Unnecessary Traffic
With a large number of customers struggling to locate products, a store gets excessively crowded and chaotic. It is only avoided if the customers know the shortest way to their desired destinations at all times without reading complicated maps or numerous signs. Overcrowding is detrimental to a customer’s experience and a store’s sales.
Lack of Safety
Large, maze-like spaces increase the risk of getting lost. Even a brief experience of feeling lost has the potential to jeopardize a customer’s mood to shop and explore the store for products they might be interested in purchasing.
Click here to see some alarming statistics about the biggest problems of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores worldwide.
Simplifying Instore Navigation with ARway.ai
ARway.ai enables you to create an indoor navigation system in augmented reality with just a floor plan without coding, beacons, or hardware. You can create your own store navigation app and white-label it with ARway.ai’s ready-to-use AR templates.
ARway.ai makes instore navigation easy and reliable, combining blue dot technology with augmented reality, eliminating any possibility of confusion or getting lost. Following directions with clear arrows that change direction as you move or listening to voice instructions is as simple as navigation gets for people of all ages, and it ensures you take the shortest path to your destination.
Watch this video to learn how ARway.ai can transform the retail shopping experience for customers.
It also allows users to add engaging AR experiences along the customer’s route, creating increased monetization and brand awareness opportunities.
Immersive instore experiences along with instore navigation make ARway.ai a real game-changer for retail.
Creating Interactive Retail Experiences with ARway.ai
ARway.ai unleashes a whole new world of endless applications to amplify the shopping experience. ARway.ai allows users to integrate 3D holograms of characters, artists, and brand mascots along with audio for creating captivating experiences.
Arway.ai can be used for creating and sharing entertaining, educational, and promotional experiences.
It allows users to monetize the airspace with AR promotions.
AR announcements and offers are more memorable and impactful than physical mediums like posters or flyers. Users can direct customers to their website, social media, or physical stores with AR promotions.
According to data by Mindshare UK, AR boosts ad recall by 70%. As per data by Threekit, 71% of consumers say they would shop more frequently if they used AR.
ARway.ai empowers you to interact with your customers in a way like never before. You can launch store-wide scavenger hunts fueled with AR characters, interesting audio-visual clues, and surprising experiences in augmented reality around every corner.
Engage your customers with interactive loyalty programs where customers engage with products in AR while physically standing in the store. ARway.ai allows you to trigger entire AR experiences using brand logos and packaging as scannable visual markers.
With ARway.ai, you can transform a simple walk through the store into an interactive experience that customers will talk about long after they leave.
The Benefits of Using ARway.ai for Instore Navigation and Interactive Retail Experiences
ARway.ai unlocks exciting possibilities of augmented reality in retail. Let’s consider some of its benefits.
1. Unbox and Deploy
Go to market with your maps in minutes by uploading your floor plan and launching out-of-the-box, ready-to-use AR templates. No coding is required to create your store navigation map or launch an AR experience.
2. High Accessibility
Users must simply log into the web-based studio to create AR site maps. Customers access these maps by scanning a QR code with their smartphone cameras.
3. Inclusive Experiences
ARway.ai enables users to add voice instructions for customers throughout their journey in the store, making it possible for people with disabilities like visual impairments to make the most of the navigation platform.
4. Guided Tours, Virtual Tour Guides, and Instore Experiences
Multiple visual and audio-narrated guided tours and interactive AR experiences can be easily curated within a single site map. Such tours strengthen the customers’ emotional bond with the brands they encounter and help them engage with more brands on their journey.
ARway.ai users can even add holographic tour guides to the virtual site map to make navigation more captivating and more accessible to follow. This eliminates the need for customers to compromise their privacy by approaching salespersons for assistance.
5. No Hardware or Beacons Required
ARway.ai doesn’t require the installation of hardware components such as BLE beacons. A computer/laptop is all a user needs to utilize the platform’s features. A customer needs only a smartphone to benefit from every facet of the AR navigation platform.
6. Airspace Monetization Opportunities
ARway.ai allows users to monetize the space with tappable ads and brand marketing content in their stores and create additional revenue streams in augmented reality. It makes it exceptionally easy to execute AR-based digital campaigns, including those enhanced with realistic 3D animations.
7. New Opportunities for Gamification
ARway.ai generates the possibility of adding highly immersive and location-persistent virtual games within the instore navigation experience. For example, users can utilize the inbuilt library of AR spatials to design a treasure hunt in augmented reality that allows customers to find hidden virtual ‘treasures’ in the store and redeem points to win rewards.
8. Easy Updating
An interactive store map created with ARway.ai isn’t set in stone. It can be updated as many times and as frequently as users need. You don’t have to create new projects and start from scratch every time the interiors of the store and the placements of products are changed.
9. Cost-Efficiency
ARway’s AR-based navigation platform is significantly less expensive than WPS navigation systems. It is exceptionally cost-effective and accurate at location positioning within an indoor space with multiple stories, including those underground.
10. Vast Inbuilt Library of 3D Models
Static and animated 3D models, called AR spatials, can be added to the AR navigation platform from ARway.ai’s built-in library. It has a wide range of commonly used AR spatials, like moving 3D arrows. It saves users time creating 3D models or finding and importing AR templates from online sources.
11. Creation Studio for 3D Modeling
Suppose a user requires a unique 3D model or AR spatial that isn’t available in the inbuilt library. In that case, they can create it easily in ARway.ai’s Creation Studio and integrate it into their navigation platform.
12. Analytics and Insights
Users can collect insightful data about customer traffic patterns from ARway.ai, including the most frequently visited locations in the store and heat maps of the customer dwell times at various locations in the store. Access to such helpful data enables users to promote ads at prime locations to maximize visibility and conversions.
Click here for an in-depth understanding of ARway.ai and its instore navigation features.
Click here to connect with us if you have queries about instore mapping.
