I wanted to start a discussion on bringing the VR to E-commerce, and what’s doable at the moment in this topic.
Since VR is a very good (best?) medium to visualize and showcase products, I’ve been looking for ways to use it that are actually useful and practical rather than entertainment. There are plenty of videos of companies doing shopping experiences, but I call all of them marketing bullshit which doesn’t work at all, since you can’t really test them, it’s just a video about it.
I’ve been already creating apps like this for my clients, but for offline purposes, so they can bring the headset and show it to people at fairs or in their office etc.
What I’m trying to do now is to create an app with a working payment system so that people can browse, add items to the cart and actually pay for them while in VR.
Things to think about:
How to enter and store card data
Virtual keyboards for input are ugly and not user-likey, should be avoided?
How to authenticate the payment, get SMS data and pop-up the text on the side? Voice recognition?
I’ve asked Oculus about VR to non-VR mode and it won’t be supported any time soon, so taking out your phone from headset to input data is out of question when it comes to GearVR. (I want the app to be multiplatform) - this would be doable on Cardboard.
Make it a platform (not for dedicated clients) and use virtual currency that you buy on the web and use IAP?
Skip VR payments, allow users to only browse, add to cart and tell them to make the payment on clients website (if has any)?
There are lots of problems that need to be solved when developing such solutions and I can’t even think about them all. I’m also hoping to interest credit card companies in this too, to look for help from their end, and of course Unity devs.
Good discussion to have. Let’s hope it moves forwards since it’ll be a rising tide for all VR stuff.
A couple of very quick thought…
I assume you’re considering device-integrated payment options as a first step? E.g. Google Pay. Maybe PayPal, Amazon, etc? I think jumping out of VR is to-be-avoided if at all possible.
This might be obvious but it’d probably be ideal to avoid making it mobile-specific. If the same platform can be used by home VR, that’d obviously encourage adoption (both vendor and user). Not sure what platform-integral payment systems there are on desktop. Obviously the browsers have this sort of thing. Some way to punt actual payment processing to an in-VR browser maybe?
I’m thinking of a solution that would work on all platforms, not device-integrated, since you probably can’t use Google Pay when publising to Oculus Store because the app won’t be verified by Google.
To be honest I actually think that the only option now is to make your own web platform where users create accounts and put their CC info, which is then kept at your payment processor company. You could then browse for vendor’s apps and download them from the app platform it was published; and when it comes to payments inside VR you simply use your platform API to request for the credit card info, with a PIN or some graphic authentication.
WHICH IS BASICALLY MAKING ANOTHER OCULUS STORE for the only purpose of implementing a way to buy hard goods. Then if Oculus decides to somehow allow that in a year or two, you’re burnt.
PC versions would definitely allow for more tailored experiences while in the shop, and I definitely do not want to disregard that platform, but for the end user that is actually buying the items, getting a 1500$ (pc and googles) set to view products in 3D environment would be too much, while 200$ is more appealing.
You can even get a free GearVR copy when buying Samsung phones if you check the right stores, and there are also more users of mobile VR so from vendor’s point of view, bigger audience = more potential customers.
When it comes to PC we should also take into account webVR which allows you to use your website resources (accounts, cc data) easily since it would be all in one solution, a regular website with just an embedded VR viewer.
I don’t know hovewer what about the desktop, but I guess a redirect to the website would be the fastest solution here too.