For real-world retailers, virtual worlds offer some unique challenges. Beyond the generic applications such as marketing, recruitment and remote collaboration, actually moving to the point where you can sell effectively through a virtual world is potentially problematic.
Pure virtual world retailers not only have few problems, but also have many advantages. Their stock is completely digital, they have no issues of raw materials, production, distribution. Even Point-of-Sale is simplicity itself, a buyers electronic wallet automatically being debited as they click on buy - and the product is delivered straight to their inventory. No wonder that in Second Life the in-world economy turns over in excess of $1Million a day (in US dollars).
But for people looking for real world goods the whole process is far more cumbersome. Actually having to walk down an isle of books (when with Amazon everything is just a click away), making sure that you in-world wallet has enough credit (the "typical" SL wallet has about £2 in it - enough for a good SL suit, but very little in the real world), and then worrying about whether it fits or looks right in the real world. Perhaps it's not suprising that virtual-commerce is yet to be a runaway success.
Social Shopping
The one ray of hope in all this is the notion of "social shopping". We have long maintained that the web is great for information and transaction, but that virtual worlds are great for social interaction. By that measure shopping which is transactional (eg books, eBay etc) is always likely to be easier on the web, whereas shopping which is more social (eg clothing, furniture, even some food shopping) might work better in virtual worlds.
Interestingly it is this social shopping category that has not done too well on the web. But in a virtual world the shopper can not only buy the real product - but also try out the virtual product - does it fit with their house or their body, or meet the approval of their friends? Virtual worlds might finally offer these products their route to virtual market.
Managing the Customer
A common complaint of shops (and offices) in virtual worlds is that they have no staff. Whilst it might be expensive to put a real member of staff in a virtual world the whole time, we can offer a variety of automated solutions that either alert you to virtual visitors (and let your call centre talk to them without running a virtual world application), or which provide computer controlled avatars that can talk to your customers and answer their questions (and even ask marketing questions of their own).
Virtual worlds can also track customers with an ability unmatched in the real world. You can know how often someone visits your store, which isles they go to, how long they dwell there and what they buy. And all of this data can be exported to your main CRM system.
Closing the Sale
To get around the virtual wallet issue it makes sense for the final purchase to be made in real currency. At present this is best managed by linking the customer to a secure web page - as on the web. By designing the pages for in-world use, and with the emergence of in-world browsers, the whole experience can be kept "in-world" far more effectively than even a year ago.
Next Steps
If you think that virtual worlds could help you deliver a new and effective retail experience to your customers then we'd be more than happy to come and present to you to give you a better understanding of what this technology can offer now, and where it might be going in the future. Please give us a call.
