Snapchat has announced that AR Enterprise Services (ARES), their AR shopping experience technology will be expanding into apps outside of Snapchat as well as websites and physical stores.
Jill Popelka, head of AR Enterprise Solutions at Snapchat, said: “We’re passionate about bringing value to our community through AR both on and off Snapchat. We’ve been innovating, building, and we’ve seen the impact of our AR technologies for our partners across industries for nearly a decade.
“When it comes to retail, we’ve revolutionised shopping with digital Try-On and Fit and Sizing recommendations.”
ARES’ first offering for retailers, Shopping Suite, has shown success for businesses to improve brand loyalty, decrease product return rates, and differentiate in a competitive environment.
The platform’s Shopping Suite is made up of five features, including a 3D viewer, AR Try-On, and Fit Finder to make it easier for customers to shop with confidence and allow retailers to make AR creation and management simple, fast, and cost-effective.
• AR Try-On: Shoppers can try on new styles of clothing, footwear, and accessories in real time. This includes clothing try-on technology, which allows shoppers to upload a photo of themselves to instantly see how a product looks on them, and accessory try-on, which lets shoppers interact with products in AR experiences live, directly from product detail pages.
• 3D Viewer: An interactive product visualization experience that lets shoppers review every angle and detail of an item.
• Fit Finder: An AI technology to give shoppers highly accurate fit and size recommendations perfect for their unique body shape and fit preferences.
• Enterprise Manager: A front-end dashboard and backend infrastructure to manage and create AR assets, implement the shopping suite SDK, create AR experiences, and manage 3D asset catalogues – all while seeing real-time performance analytics for consumer engagement and conversions.
• Hands-on Integration Services: A dedicated in-house team helps clients seamlessly onboard and enable shopping suite’s powerful features from kick-off to completion.
Popelka said: “Merchants who incorporated Fit Finder and Apparel Try-On features together saw a meaningful reduction in the rate of product returns and an increase in purchases.
“Dress retailer Princess Polly delivered over 50 million fit and sizing recommendations and saw a 24% lower return rate when they use our technology. Clothing brand Gobi Cashmere saw that shoppers using the features were 4X as likely to convert,” she added.
AR Mirrors is another new ARES service coming to Snapchat. It brings AR to businesses in their own physical spaces and events so that customers can virtually try on products, and play with engaging experiences that encourage them to create and share content.
Snapchat is also partnering with Coca-Cola to transform vending machines using AR. Their first prototype is an AR-enabled Coca-Cola vending machine, which offers a portal to AR experiences, rewards and more. Customers are able to step up to the machine and use hand gestures to control what comes next.
“We can’t wait for customers to try these new experiences the next time they shop, and we’re looking forward to bringing business value through AR to even more industries soon,” Popelka added.
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