How the metaverse can help retail with inclusivity

The metaverse presents a new dawn for the retail industry. Industry experts predict that the metaverse might be as revolutionary as the internet when it launched in 1989. The internet opened the retail industry to e-commerce, quickly becoming the most powerful way to buy and sell products.

According to a Google AR survey conducted in 2019, 66% of people expressed interest in using augmented reality to make purchasing decisions. Shopify's research shows a 94% higher conversion rate for products with AR content than products without AR.

Inclusivity will be the biggest improvement in the retail industry resulting from adopting the metaverse.

The metaverse is expected to help the retail industry improve inclusivity by offering diverse avatars that accurately represent a person's identity, improving the feel of products for the disabled using advanced audio and visual tools, removing physical barriers to shopping, and allowing users to experience the metaverse with the technology they have available to them.

Here's how brands can get closer to their customers through the metaverse.

What is inclusivity in retail?

Inclusivity is a raging topic in retail, even in e-commerce, where there are perceivably fewer barriers to shopping than in the physical world. Inclusivity seeks to remove physical and technological barriers to shoppers from different walks of life with varying physical abilities to provide an equal and similar shopping experience to all store visitors.

Inclusivity often targets disabled people or individuals who cannot use certain mediums to shop, such as phone calls, visual tools, or audio tools. These individuals may be blind, deaf, immobile, or suffering from anxiety that prohibits them from physically visiting a retail store or using a certain medium, such as phone calls to make an order.

Outside the metaverse, in traditional e-commerce, several tools and standards exist to create a more inclusive retail shopping environment. These include using AI-driven translators to break language barriers and web-standard accessibility tools to help the hearing and visually impaired navigate an e-commerce page.

Inclusivity also involves adapting your e-commerce strategy to the needs of your customer. For instance, customers who're anxious about making phone calls should have the option of talking to support, a bot, or making an order through text.

The end goal of inclusivity in retail is to ensure that every customer feels like the store understands their needs and provides an experience that fits them. Thus, they feel that they belong.

The metaverse offers endless options for delivering such dynamic and unique experiences.

How the metaverse helps with inclusivity

Here're some revolutionary ways the metaverse helps improve inclusivity in the retail sector.

Removal of Physical Barriers
The metaverse relies on mixed reality, a combination of augmented reality and virtual reality, to create a new experience and feel of the world. In retail and e-commerce within the metaverse, virtual 3D stores and showrooms will remove physical barriers that hamper the physically impaired from having exciting in-store shopping experiences.

The metaverse also allows the use of advanced AI tools to break the communication barrier between the physically challenged and other members of society. For instance, individuals with hearing impairment can have AI-driven tools to interpret sign language instantly and facilitate communication with others in the metaverse.

People of diverse languages and cultures can also seamlessly interact using these translation tools, creating a more inclusive social environment and communication channel in the metaverse's retail stores.

More Diverse Avatars
The metaverse aims to create possibilities for diverse representation that reflects the real world's diversity using an endless combination of avatars. This means that users and shoppers in the metaverse can represent themselves in their unique identities without limitations on physical abilities, gender, and language.

For people with disabilities, the metaverse includes assistive devices for avatars, such as over-the-ear hearing aids, cochlear implants, and wheelchairs, to allow them to represent themselves as they are in real life if they wish to do so.
According to research, this option for disabled people to reflect on aspects of their disabilities and show them as core parts of their identities has been a missing and much-needed part of virtual experiences.

Others may choose to self-represent using totally imagined avatars. Inclusivity involves giving metaverse users the freedom and creativity to choose how they want the world to see them and eliminate any preconceptions they might face when interacting with people in real life.

Improved Feel of Products
It is easy for someone physically impaired to navigate through a virtual store and interact with products in the store close to how they would in real life. Advanced tools using haptic feedback, voice control, and closed captions allow the physically challenged to feel products in a 3D store.

The use of photorealistic graphics also helps create a more immersive experience similar to real-life.

Few Technological Limitations
As advanced as the metaverse is, its use is not technologically limited. You don't have to use a headset to have a transformative and inclusive retail shopping experience. The metaverse is accessible through other simpler devices, such as mobile phones. Breaking the technological barrier makes the metaverse more accessible to people from diverse backgrounds, improving inclusivity in the metaverse's retail space

The metaverse will drive the next big revolution in the retail sector. Start investing in metaverse virtual 3D stores and showrooms and discover how you can bring people living with disabilities and other individuals from diverse cultures into your retail space.