If you’ve been wondering how to replicate the in-person sales experience online, look no further than virtual showrooms. These immersive digital spaces bring virtual and hybrid appointments to life, helping you interact with wholesale buyers better than ever before with features like detailed product visuals, engaging presentations, and easier-than-offline 1-click shopping.
Here’s everything you need to know:
How virtual showrooms elevate the wholesale process
A virtual showroom is exactly what it sounds like – your wholesale showroom in a digital format. The best virtual showrooms take the wholesale process to whole new heights for buyers and brands in home, outdoor, fashion, apparel, footwear, beauty, and more.
Here are a few things you can do with yours:
- Create a new reality: A well-merchandised virtual showroom can really help you step things up with an immersive experience. An otherwise flat digital world comes to life through multimedia content, allowing you to invite buyers into the world of your brand.
- Collaborate efficiently: Elevate your virtual appointments with features like order drafts, notes, and a whiteboard to recreate the intimacy of real-world interactions. They also support and encourage collaboration and help ensure everyone is on the same page, reducing mistakes.
- Sell faster: Your customers can shop your virtual showroom at any time. You don’t have to be in the same place, on the same schedule, or even in the same time zone.
- Improve your client relationships: Buyers appreciate the ease and professionalism of the best virtual showrooms. They take the guesswork out of the process and allow them to browse, buy, take notes, plan, and visualize assortments on their own time.
- Preview collections: You can hit the ground running when market begins by sharing your collections with current clients and special prospects prior to the shows.
Elements of a virtual showroom
- Dynamic videos with shoppable hotspots for placing orders with one click: showroom tours, runway videos, designer or founder interviews, influencer content, ad campaigns...
- 360-degree images to share the details you need
- Images made shoppable by hotspots: such as photos of your brick-and-mortar showroom or stores
- Customizable homepage portal
- Linesheets that may be personalized for specific stores or buyers
- Lookbooks and digital catalogs
- Filters for colors, sizes, seasons, and delivery dates
- Key information: international size charts, fit guides, certifications (such as for sustainability), press releases, editorials, press
- Essential products of the season
- Mood boards, inspiration, color palettes, and collection stories
- Social media: links or grid previews
How to set up a NuORDER virtual showroom
Work with your visual merchandising, marketing, sales, and eCommerce teams to strategize the goals and visual impact of your virtual showroom. And think about the applications for your brand:
- Will you use it for side-by-side appointments?
- Product walkthroughs?
Create an immersive storytelling experience, but also keep things practical. Buyers should be able to get to work efficiently and your message for a particular collection or season should be clear.
When you’re ready to start, use the drag n’ drop page builder to easily add, remove or rearrange the different elements of your virtual showroom. You can customize this digital space to work best for your brand or according to the season’s merchandising needs.
Here are some best practices to help you get started.
However, you decide to approach its design, be sure to stay true to your brand DNA, your brand identity, and the look and inspiration for your B2C eCommerce store. The point isn’t to recreate the wheel but to create an environment that’s instantly recognizable as your brand.
Check out NuORDER to learn more.
NuORDER is a B2B eCommerce platform and marketplace, connecting retailers and brands and streamlining the wholesale process for virtual, hybrid, and in-person market appointments. The NuORDER platform offers a seamless and collaborative way to do business with interactive and customizable solutions, easy POS payments, real-time inventory insights, comprehensive data and more for increasingly informed buying decisions.
