Creating an experience closer to the real world shopping is what online retailers would give an arm for. But for now, Indian ecommerce players are happy to settle for little things like images of the product from different angles and video catalogs which make a big difference to conversion rates. But that’s an expensive and sweaty business. Sweat not.
“It need not be that expensive or difficult,” says Sreepriya Koppula, Founder, CEO at Turnaround Innovision, a startup which is trying to make it easier for ecommerce companies to create 360 degree photographs which load quickly and aren’t as expensive as videos.
Don’t take her word for it, check the picture below.
A 360Image is built with a series of real photographs taken around the object from different angles. The user can simply turn it around and see the object from any angle. “It is a customizable javascript based software and has to be integrated on a catalog one time,” says Sreepriya who has already bagged a few clients such as UrbanLadder and JustEat.
There aren’t any who provide similar services in India at the price, she says. That should explain why Flipkart, Myntra and most others still have static images. “Comparable services available in the International market cost in the range of $200 per product and the scale is nowhere close to ours,” she said. There are services like webrotate360 which offer similar benefits but they seem to be running out of the United States.
The cost for a 360 view doesn’t vary much from the market price for professional product photography, and its an automated process which saves money, added Sreepriya, an IIT Kharagpur (class of 2004) alum.
The company has also launched a web app for consumers to be able to create 360 degree images. You need to take a series of photographs at fixed intervals around the object and upload them onto their server. The UI for the DIY app is pretty basic and won’t tell you what’s going or how to do things but it works!
They way the ecommerce industry is growing, there is definitely a market for this and then there is the so called first mover advantage. What worries us though is that there is a possibility that the company runs the risk of its technology getting rapidly commoditized. Remember the massive digitization companies that came along a few years ago?
