If the couch don’t fit, you don’t have to commit

Student comments on If the couch don’t fit, you don’t have to commit

1. November 16, 2016 Molly Middaugh says:

   It is true that people are increasingly purchasing furniture online, but I am concerned about whether Wayfair’s operating model fits its price point. Once one graduates from the Ikea days, furniture can become a significant investment. And as much as we have progressed into a digital purchasing world, for a several thousand dollar investment in living room furniture I believe that people are still going to want to see and feel the furniture that they plan to buy. As such, I am concerned that the exclusively online operating model might not be the best bet for furniture with higher prices. AR/VR technology might be able to help assuage this problem, but I don’t think that it will solve it.

   That said, I think that for the lower priced items Wayfair has an excellent business and operating model, and the AR/VR will make it a batter user experience. I like your suggestion about providing interior design recommendations. It would also be beneficial if they could implement a program that allow your to place different pieces of furniture in a mock-up of your own home to better visualize how different pieces would fit together.
2. November 16, 2016 Johann F says:

   Very cool post, Mike! I think you are absolutely right when saying that these AR and VR technologies are a natural extension of Wayfair’s business and operating model and thus helps the company to strengthen their core product offering. Having said that, it remains to be seen how much adoption this kind of technology will really experience among consumers and thus act as a significant driver to sales (which you also pointed out). I can imagine that it must be very expensive to develop these kinds of technological systems including creating and maintaining a 3D database of their entire catalog of ~7 million items. I wonder how management is thinking about weighing these large up-front investment costs against their expectations of actual sales impact and at what point in the future they will decide whether this actually is an economically viable opportunity for them or not. I guess only time can tell. In the meantime, maybe they can also promote more benefits to customers using this type of technology, such as a percentage discount off their purchase if the customer researched beforehand using AR or VR (this could be beneficial to both since I imagine average returns on orders made after using AR/VR are lower than on the average order).
3. November 17, 2016 allenmind says:

   Oh my god this is what I want!! We just bought an apartment and are confused about picking up appropriate furnitures. What’s even worse is that both my partner and I are both out of our home city for a while. We can definitely discuss and order things online. But we’re so afraid of receiving the expensive furnitures but they turn out to be not fitting with our room. So we decided to stop thinking about furnitures until we’re back in town – but with the help of AR VR technology, we can feel more safe and confident again!! The only concern is that Wayfair still needs consumers to sit inside their apartment while picking up furnitures – could people take pictures of their rooms and then also enjoy the AR VR scene by themselves? Also, AR VR facilities are still not very common in people’s daily lives. Would it be better if Wayfair has offline stores for people to experience the service?
4. November 20, 2016 Daniel says:

   Interesting post Mike! As a Wayfair customer, I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about any of these options. To that end, I agree with your recommendation that Wayfair should try to increase awareness and adoption of these features as soon as possible. For me, the greatest part of the value proposition is assessing whether the furniture can actually fit in the room instead of using the app to determine if the fabric or design matches the aesthetic of the room. One consideration I have is whether this puts any burden on Wayfair’s retail partners or whether Wayfair alone is taking on all the heavy lifting of ensuring the products featured on the site can be deployed in this application.
5. November 20, 2016 TPA says:

   Really interesting post Mike! Given that this year was the first time that I had to buy furniture, I would have really appreciated the options that Wayfair is developing. Having said that, I find it really risky to invest heavily on an option that requires customers to have a VR headset, as it would imply a big barrier until the technology is accessible enough, which seems to still be far away. In addition, I would worry that going forward the cost related to the inclusion of each product into the virtual library may be too high, and hence economically unviable. Perhaps, the company could focus on the short term in improving the WayfairView App, and make it a central part of their business and operations.
6. November 20, 2016 DA says:

   As an AR evangelist I think your post does a great job of helping us imagine some real-world applications of Augmented Reality. AR is hard – it requires the creation of rich 3-D content, it needs a clear line of sight to a marker onto which it projects the digital image, and it requires significant AR infrastructure to reach scale. Retailers and apparel makers will have plenty of AR applications (e.g. “virtual try-on” services), but I worry that the state of the technology is too premature for Wayfair to reap anything but some reputational benefits from their project.

   Further – have you considered how mixed reality (MR), the likes of which is being developed by Magic Leap as we speak, could enrich the e-commerce experience here? There remains the adoption challenge before any of this reaches scale, but the ability to more realistically interact with digital objects in the real world (e.g. physical-digital obstruction) could aid the virtual showroom application that Wayfair is attempting to build.