Retailers have long developed an art of selling us more by using architectural and placement techniques in physical stores. They put cheap products at the front to attract bystanders inside the store, colorful products at the bottom of the racks so that kids can grab them and start pitching their parents.

This knowledge was brutally useless in the electronic world as in that case success was more about reading Jakob Nielsen and trying to fit a maximum number of products in a 1024*768 screen.

Now that 3D is back on the radars with the success of World of Warcraft or Second Life, it is not surprising to see retailers create shopping environments allowing them to reuse their hard-learned lessons.

In Germany Otto launched a 3D store – demoed back in January at DLD07 – that “offers functions that are not available or that are difficult to implement on traditional e-commerce Web sites, including the ability to see sets of clothing together or dynamically zoom in on image details”.

3D shopping as the future of ecommerce? Probably.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 1:24 am and is filed under business, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.