5 Visual Commerce examples to steal in 2022

May 9, 2022
By
Gaby Granata

Ecommerce has seen a dramatic shift from transactional buying to visual shopping experiences over the last few years. Consumers today not only respond to visual shopping experiences, they expect them. Social Media platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok have shifted the ecommerce landscape and created the appetite for compelling product imagery and short-form video content that consumers have come to expect from brands and retailers.

Here are five examples of Visual Commerce ideas to inspire your ecommerce strategy in 2022.

Shoppable Scenes

Online furniture retailer MADE.com launched their ‘Complete the look’ room designer mid-pandemic when customers were confined to their homes, unable to visit showrooms for inspiration and to gain confidence in their purchases. With the lack of in-store experiences on offer, MADE sought to bridge the “interaction gap” and introduced their ‘Complete the look” room designer. It works by synchronising shopper data with correlated deep tagging to generate tailor made room settings that feature selected items for each shopper, allowing cross-category sales around the anchor product. Since launch, they’ve seen customer interaction soar with customers who engage with ‘Complete the look’ spending 25% longer on the site and creating on average four customer room designs.

3D Space Planner

Luxury garden furniture brand Moda Furnishings have launched the Fixtuur Visual Space widget on a number of their product pages which enables their customers to design their outdoor space with Moda’s modular sofas and outdoor furniture, and view it in Augmented Reality. They have also utilised this tool to enhance their in-store shopping experience where customers can plan their space in the show room with a sales consultant to guide them. Preliminary results have shown Moda’s customers engaging longer with the website and average order value increasing.

Guided Shopping

Algorithmic-guided selling is widely used and to great effect, especially during the pandemic with customers needing assistance but being unable to visit stores. Perfume shopping is a sensory experience which is uniquely difficult to replicate online. Sephora’s Perfume Diagnosis recommends new perfumes to customers based on perfumes, brands and ingredients they already like. Sephora also uses the data acquired to build a profile of what their customer likes and sends personalised emails to them based on their preferences. 

Shoppable UGC

Car manufacturer CUPRA introduced content curation platform StoryStream on their site which integrates editorial and user-generated content into their communications and marketing activities.  features two streams: ‘More reasons to choose a CUPRA Formentor’ – which curates PR-generated editorial reviews from media, and a curated social media stream, feeding user-generated and client-activated content. CUPRA have control over the curation and have used it to thread in their own tactical and promotional panels with bespoke calls-to-action to complement the third-party content. The results show that over 45% of website actions (test-drive requests, finance calculation, car configuration) come from users who have engaged with the stream at some point in their journey. 

Detailed Product Videos    

Online appliance retailer AO.com attributes some of their success to their investment in producing high quality product videos. Their videos introduce new products, new features and new technology, as well as product reviews and how-to videos. They create video and multimedia content that answers every potential question a customer may have about a product, which keeps them on the AO site and not searching the internet for information elsewhere. Their detailed product videos provide a reliable and consistent source of information on the products they sell from various manufacturers. This consistency equates to customers who trust in the AO brand, which makes them the go-to for shoppers in the market for new appliances.

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