What is V-Commerce?
It is common to hear people talking about e-commerce, but in recent months a new term has come to light in online fashion blogs and magazines: “v-commerce”. But what does it mean? And how does it relate to the most widespread “e-commerce”? Let’s discover it together.
The fashion industry is an always-growing market, where either you innovate or you disappear. The market is constantly changing, and brands are doing everything to please the customer offering an always better shopping experience.
One of the trends that have been solidifying in the past years is the one of e-commerce, which is letting the user buy apparel by staying sit comfortably at home. We have all used some online shops to buy shoes, dresses, or whatever we needed: it is very practical and very comfortable, and thanks to the “free return” policy that almost all e-commerce stores offer, it is possible to buy the items without worrying too much about having picked up the wrong size. The e-commerce trend has spiked with the coronavirus pandemic that forced us to stay at home, and it has probably saved many apparel shops and fashion brands in a period when all the shops had to stay closed.
E-commerce offers a very practical way of buying pieces of clothes, but it lacks completely in providing a full experience to the user. Going to a retail shop is not only about buying clothes, but it is also looking at the latest released collections, trying out clothes that we can’t even afford to buy, being in a physical place with our friends, and having fun talking about the various dresses. It is a social experience, it is a ritual, that the cold grids of items in an e-commerce website can’t offer us. It would be great if we could have the possibility of comfortably buying apparel at home like on an e-commerce website, but with the social experience of trying out clothes with our friends. It turns out that this experience does exist, and it is called v-commerce.
V-commerce, or virtual commerce, is the possibility of buying clothes in virtual reality (or similar technologies). If e-commerce is the purchase experience 2.0, v-commerce is the 3.0 one, that offers the best of both worlds: it lets you buy everything from home, by letting you see yourself in a virtual 3D store together with your friends where you can do the same things that you would do in a physical shop.
Imagine it like a multiplayer game, like the popular Fortnite, but where instead of shooting each other, you buy clothes together. Your avatar can wander around the virtual shop, chat with the avatars of your friends, discuss the virtual clothes that you see there, and then try on the fly the virtual clothes. You can see yourself wearing the various clothes in a virtual mirror and also ask suggestions to your friends. If you like an item, if you think that it fits you, then you can buy it with your real money, and it arrives at home in a few days. It’s the shopping experience of the future: when augmented and virtual reality headsets will become mainstream, most probably starting from 2022-2023, we will have always more experiences of this kind. V-commerce will become the new e-commerce, and either brands adopt it, or they get superseded by their competitors.
DWorld is already projected into the future, and its social virtual world already offers many v-commerce experiences, not only of luxurious apparel, but also of yachts, food, and apartments. In DWorld, you can wander around the beautiful city of Monaco together with your friends in virtual reality. As you would do in the real city, you can enter all together in many different virtual shops. Inside them, you can explore the items, have a chat about them, for then deciding whether to buy them or not.
In the virtual luxury boutique, for instance, you can try selected high-quality pieces of clothes and enjoy the fun of trying them together. Then, when you are ready to exit, you can decide if buying the things that you have tried on or not. If you buy them, you have a double possibility: either you just buy them in the virtual world (to make your avatar more beautiful), or you also buy them for the real world. In the second case, after you have paid, in a few days you will receive at home the real piece of clothing that you have tried virtually. Both the real you and the virtual you become more fashionable in front of the real and virtual friends. This creates a fantastic bridge between the virtual world and the real world, a mix we should all get used to in the upcoming years.
If you want to try this innovative v-commerce experience yourself, register for a free account on DWorld today and live the future of shopping inside the virtual Monaco!
