Composing the perfect interior design from millions of products: Home and Decor Retail Onboarding by Divante Innovation Lab

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Product clutter in the home and decor retail sector is real. At Divante Innovation Lab, we came up with an eCommerce retail onboarding solution that can cut right through it. It will help you win over a customer through a personal approach and personalized interior design arrangements.

See the full presentation about the Retail Onboarding concept >

The curse of the abundance in home and decor

Marketplaces are getting massive. The top web stores contain millions of products from more than thousands of suppliers. No wonder it’s easy to get lost. 

Let’s say you go to buy a lamp to match your apartment’s interior design. What you get when you land on the web store is thousands of items that you can filter by multiple categories. However, none of them actually brings you closer to your goal. You have to manually dig through the product lists.

That’s an awful customer experience.

Cutting through the product clutter

It inspired our team at Innovation Labs. By leveraging a set of composable commerce tools, we’ve built a proof of concept for a retail onboarding assistant. It guides you to styles and designs, advises you on interior design ideas, helps you define your vision, and finally, it helps find your perfect design and complement it with matching accessories.



Personal virtual eCommerce assistant

Our retail onboarding assistant is a comprehensive virtual guide through the whole discovery and shopping experience. 

  1. It welcomes you on the website with a smooth and visual onboarding experience. It’s a quiz-like experience that helps to discover your needs and likes. 
  2. Once it aligns with your needs, it can help you define them. It educates you on design, hones your vision, and inspires you. 
  3. It learns your preferences and, instead of thousands of generic items, shows you personalized products that will fit your vision and help build a consistent visual style.
  4. It learns from your response, optimizes its model, and shows you products that will be closer and closer to perfection with each iteration. 
  5. And finally, it will be able to visualize your interior design in augmented reality.

It learns and optimizes itself with new data and turns a chaotic experience into a straightforward process. It makes your journey for furniture, arrangements, and styles effortless and enjoyable. You’re simply taken care of as a customer.

Building better relationships with clients

Retail onboarding is just as practical from the eCommerce manager’s point of view.

Out-of-the-box furniture is no longer good enough in a competitive market. People want to be asked about their preferences, style, and lifestyle  and receive personalized and beautiful arrangement suggestions. It’s usually a time-consuming process to advise and assist them. Retail onboarding automates this task, reducing your customer support costs.

Basically, it’s the missing link between useful, educational content you publish on your website and the shopping process in your store. Your shop dynamically discovers users’ needs, helps build a relationship, and shows that your company is a brand that understands them and wants to make their life easier.

And it helps you understand them better. It’s a perfect data mine for personalization.

Personalized client experience

It’s in your best interest to put the personalized products’ in front of users as fast as possible. People are easily overwhelmed when it comes to interior design and a multitude of choices. It’s an obstacle that can quickly bounce confused users away from your online store.

Personalization is the key to win their attention. You can show them what matters to them instead of just generically putting up the highest margin products that drive them away.

Assistance in the discovery process

At the end of the day, users come for a particular product that fits their vision. It might not even be defined yet. They need to get there, and that takes time. 

Usually, it means surfing all around the web looking for inspiration. Retail onboarding contains all of that creative process within your brand’s ecosystem and feeds their imagination with personalized arrangements of your products. You can also offer them complementary solutions right when they need them.

The concept itself is inherently multichannel. It can easily match your online and offline store visitors so they can research online and purchase offline or the other way around. It can also connect them with a home interior advisor anytime they need an additional “human touch.”

Boosting business results

Our retail onboarding assistant takes customer experience to a whole other level. It gives you clear and easy to measure results, including:

  • better user engagement.
  • increased customer retention.
  • higher customer lifetime value.
  • lower bounce rate. 

Retail onboarding runs on customer data. It’s a perfect source for data-driven insights for businesses and can help to refine your target groups and customer profiles.

New opportunities in composable commerce

Retail onboarding paves the way for new technologies in eCommerce.

It can be proof from IT to business in composable commerce that allows for additional integrations, like artificial reality solutions, 3D product modeling, data crawling, etc. It can simply put that chosen lamp on your desk in virtual reality. The onboarding quiz can also help you with your loyalty program and increase social engagement. 

It’s just the beginning. If you’re up for eCommerce innovations and would like to see what retail onboarding can look like at your online store, simply contact us. Innovations should always fit your KPIs. Let’s talk about them to customize your onboarding tool and tailor it to your business.

Also, see our other concepts on Divante’s Behance and at the Divante Innovation Lab.

Published May 19, 2021