Brands woo customers with hybrid shopping experience

Creating a virtual platform for consumers at their brick and mortar stores is the latest trends, brands are incorporating to woo consumers. They are hiring technology start-ups to bridge the gap between e-commerce and physical stores. Features like 'virtual reality', 'unlimited product stock', 'similar searches' or 'related products' options are being introduced. From Walmart, Nike, USPA, Satya Paul, Being Human, Bata to Freecultr, almost all are trying to give customers the advantages that e-commerce portals offer.

Shopsense, for example is one such startup which provides brands technology-based solutions tablet-like devices installed in the store that allow customers to browse through all the brand's products, the way they would on an e-commerce portal. It allows customers to mix and match products and see how they would look in the ensemble. Another reality-based startup TeliBrahma has a similar product where a screen in the store shows how one would look in a particular dress. The company is now working on creating it for mobiles, with m-commerce boosting brand reach and sales.

And there are companies like Torchsight, which use wireless technology to capture signals from smartphones to arrive at a figure to show the percentage of footfall attracted by a store or for how long did the customers stay in a particular store or how many among them were repeat customers, and so on. Torchsight with its research helps brands understand their customers and then accordingly design their product offerings as well as marketing campaigns.

Brands like Titan's Helios, Louis Philippe, Future Group and Lawrence & Mayo work with Nifty Window, whose technology allows physical stores to showcase their inventory online, and update the inventory information and make offers in real time. Technology is gradually changing the world into virtual reality.