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Ecommerce Meets Eye-Candy: Japan’s Panoplaza Produces Virtual Storefronts

It’s not often that we see entirely new ideas in the ecommerce space. I mean, building an online store for your products typically doesn’t allow for much variety in presentation. But Panoplaza, a startup from Japan, has come up with a real-life inspired way to let you browse shops. It implements beautiful panoramic photos of actual store spaces (see below), and lets users browse those spaces remotely via the web.

Panoplaza has already made a virtual bookshop for a book retailer in Tokyo, where it shot 20 panoramic photos in order to create the three-dimensional online store. For certain books presented on the virtual shelves, there are hotspots that users can click on to display new information about those books. The startup has also created a virtual sweets shop, and have demonstrated a handy search function that allows you to search for ‘chocolate’ things in the store. For the Daimaru department store in Tokyo, Panoplaza’s new storefront has helped bring in over 100,000 page views in a two-month span, and the average time customers spend in shops is up by 30 percent. Sales are six times higher, and while there could be other factors besides Panoplaza’s storefront at work here, suffice it to say that a Panoplaza presentation helps stimulate business. Personally, I’m not sure how much of this is attributable to the novelty of the panoramic presentation, or whether such customer interest could be sustained if these virtual storefronts were more widespread. But the startup says that it has online tools for shop managers which will allow them to upload photos and make tags on items that they want to sell. So in this respect, a merchant could keep things fresh so customers would have a reason to virtually come back and browse again.

Judges questioned how the photos were taken, and how much time it takes to generate a panorama store front. But Panoplaza emphasized that merchants could later upload their own photos themselves given the improving panoramic smartphone capabilities. Panoplaza notes that the ecommerce market in Japan is worth $100 billion and is increasing every year. But because online shops are often unappealing and lacking in interactivity, it’s hard to really engage customers. From what I can see of these online shops, it definitely offers a slick interface that retailers can present to customers.