VIRTUALMALL CASE STUDY
Real-time
Visual Shopping App
Customer Profile
Our client needed a solution that would facilitate online shoppers to do remote shopping of different products and at the same time offer real-time experience of being in the store.
Issue/Problem
Several consumers prefer online shopping due to their busy schedules. But, most of the existing eCommerce apps can just display the images, details, and price of products. As such, the buyers are not able to assess the product quality or resolve their product-related queries before making the purchase decision. So remote buyers miss that in-store shopping experience where a salesperson tours them through the store, shows them the products, & addresses customer queries before making a purchase.
Result
Biz4Solutions helped the client to develop a unique and versatile eCommerce app named VirtualMall. The app offers shoppers the convenience of live in-store video shopping tours from the comfort of their homes. The remote shoppers even receive the guidance of a salesperson during such pre-booked virtual shopping tours. Once the products are purchased, customers receive free home delivery of their goods.
Overview
Biz4Solutions tailored an innovative e-commerce app that facilitates better shopping experience for shoppers as well as retailers. There are two types of apps catering to different roles: VirtualMall app (the consumer role) and VShopping app (for Shop owner and the attendee role). VirtualMall app caters to the end-users who want to engage in a chat or do video shopping to assess the products with the retail store. The VShopping app is used by store owners/representatives for responding to the chats and video streaming requests of end customers, approving video call requests, looking after the payments, adding the products to the cart and other necessities related to online shopping and product delivery. VShopping app is also used by the attendees to do the video calling activity and this role has the access only to video calling section where they can guide and offer the tour to the consumers. Consumers can pick the desired retail store and view the products via live video streaming. Store owners can add items to the shopping cart of customers and await their approval. Once the customers finalize their shopping cart, the bill is generated.
Developmental Challenges
Our team came across some developmental challenges as mentioned below:
- It was challenging to provide a speedy and smooth live streaming experience without frequent buffering woes.
- Ensuring the security of payment transactions.
Result
Our proficient and experienced development team overcame the challenge to build the desired solution. We ensured that our app’s video streaming capacity is double the value of the desired bitrate of the live stream. Various consumers will use different devices and their connectivity speed will not be the same. So, we tested our app’s video streaming performance on different types of devices and network bandwidths against the software that is carrying out the live stream encoding. We made sure that our hardware and software live stream video encoders are properly configured. We integrated razorpay payment gateway for securing payment transactions.
Solution Highlight
- Mobile number verification.
- Respond to chat and video requests.
- Live video shopping to take live virtual tours of a retail store.
- One-to-one messaging.
- Billing and Invoicing.
- Payment Integration.
- Promotions and offers.
- Schedule pickups and deliveries.
- Setting up online retail stores.
- Order confirmation and viewing the bill.
Benefits
- Mobile and Web App versions are available to cater to larger audience groups.
- The digital content is segregated into categories like Stores, Brands, Cities, Items (Menswear, Womenswear, etc.), offers, etc. to simplify the product search process.
- Chatting with retail store representatives to clarify product-related queries.
- Scheduling an appointment with the desired retail store for video shopping and chatting.
- Video shopping allows the consumers to assess the product quality in a better way and check out what deals/offers are going on at the store.
- Add item in consumers’ cart based on the feedback received during video calls/chats.
- Payment can be made using a credit card, debit card, UPI, account debit, etc.
- The item is picked up from the concerned store & dispatched via the delivery aggregator Swiggy.
- The delivery is marked as completed after receiving confirmation from the end-consumer.