Amazon has a new metaverse-style holiday shopping experience

Amazon has launched a 3-D virtual holiday showroom offering more than 100 products from brands including Beats, Kate Spade and Coach. It’s the latest example of how retailers are using virtual technology to entice shoppers. The Amazon Virtual Holiday Shop is a qualified take on the metaverse, with virtual representations of real items, but doesn’t include social aspects such as avatars or identity customization. This simplified immersion platform is reminiscent of Walmart’s virtual shopping hub, Realm, which the retailer launched in June. Realm will get an update to align with the holiday shopping season, too, Walmart said in previous announcements about its store. Also: Watch Amazon’s new holiday season commercial Both Amazon and Walmart’s destinations are easily navigable—users move as they do through Google Maps’ Street View— and require no headsets or registration processes, only a web link that can be accessed on mobile and desktop devices. These storefronts, coming from the two biggest retailers, could prove to be less demanding ways for brands to appear in virtual shopping environments, at least compared to creating a bespoke Roblox world or designing an experience for Apple’s Vision Pro. While this is not Amazon’s first use of a virtual showroom, the fact that such a major retailer continues to activate immersive shopping, and is doing so for the most important shopping season of the year, is a testament to its confidence in the emerging space. As TikTok has normalized social commerce for brands, Amazon may be in a position to do so for virtual shopping, a tactic that is still only a fringe part of brands’ marketing strategies. Also read: How Southwest is selling plane tickets on TikTok Visitors to Amazon’s holiday-themed shop can purchase items by clicking on their virtual representations, which will materialize a link to Amazon’s website. Products shown on the platform include JBL speakers, Oakley ski goggles, Coach sneakers and Stanley cups. The holiday shop will continually be updated with new items throughout the holiday season, Amazon announced. Amazon’s virtual world borrows a feature from Roblox—a portal, which will bring users to another showroom called Amazon Virtual Toy Shop. This realm is similar to the Holiday Shop, only the clickable items are all children’s gifts, featuring products from Lego and Disney, as well as toys exclusively sold by Amazon. Connecting different showrooms could be considered Amazon’s version of interoperability, the metaverse principle calling for users to freely travel between worlds. Indeed, the holiday shop features items hanging from the ceiling, which are additional portals to other virtual showrooms maintained by Amazon. One such link, a Mickey Mouse-themed ornament, takes users to a world called “Once Upon a Cottage,” where they can shop for items from Disney. Another portal links to a Harry Potter-themed world. The project took five months to develop, a senior creative product manager at Amazon wrote on LinkedIn. The virtual experience is a 180 from Amazon’s other holiday marketing effort this year: a physical toy catalog, shipped via direct mail, which gained popularity for its old-school approach. A print catalog with gifts meant for teens and adults soon followed. Amazon is the nation’s largest advertiser, according to Ad Age Leading National Advertisers.

Amazon has a new metaverse-style holiday shopping experience

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