Amazon wants to make it easier for shoppers to see how a piece of furniture would look in their living room. As such, it has unveiled the so-called Amazon Showroom, a virtual living room customers can use as a "test canvas" for their furnishings.
Available both as a standalone feature on Amazon's website and an app, Showroom lets customers place items into online living room and see how well certain items complement each other. Shoppers can tweak the flooring and the walls, perhaps to make it look more like their own living room, and swap items in and out from Amazon's own catalog.
Amazon Showroom
All the placeable items are neatly stored in the rightmost sidebar, featuring a variety of couches, chairs, tables, lamps, rugs, and even artworks. Of course, Rivet and Stone & Beam, Amazon's proprietary furniture brands, are part of the catalog.
"Amazon Showroom is a new way for customers to visualize their home furnishing purchases when shopping online," Amazon said in a statement. "The result is a photorealistic rendering of a room that answers the question: 'How will this all look together?'"
Amazon didn't launch Showroom with much fanfare, but a spokesperson has confirmed that it's the result of a recent test and is now accessible via the Amazon website and the Amazon app. Showroom is available in the "Accounts & Lists" dropdown menu on the web. It also shows up on the "Home, Garden & Pets" department. Finally, users can access it via the "Home & Kitchen" department if they're using the Amazon app.
Users can save their virtual living room for future reference. It's also possible to create and save multiple designs, which is especially useful for those finicky about their home furnishings. When satisfied, there's an "Add to cart" button that lets the shopper place all their chosen items into their cart for checkout.
Amazon Moves Into The Living Room
This is not the first time for Amazon to experiment with more dynamic ways of purchasing items for the living room. In 2017, the company launched an augmented reality feature that allowed customers to place a virtual item in their camera view to see how it looks inside the living room. However, that's only useful when shopping for a single item. Showroom is more fit for people who plan to revamp their entire living space with brand-new furnishings.
It's not just Amazon experimenting with this kind of technology, however. For instance, Walmart launched a home shopping portal for furniture ad decor last year packed with its own in-house brands and more visual, editorial-style imagery.
