Acapture and Boatsters Launch the First, End-to-End VR Webshop

With this white label app, merchants can now cover the entire customer journey, from selection to payment, offering a complete omnichannel experience

Acapture together with Boatsters have launched a Virtual Reality (VR) webshop pilot project.

Available as a white label application, Acapture’s VR webshop solution can be utilized and personalized by any merchant looking to add VR to their offering. The application covers the entire customer journey, from selection to payment. When consumers are ready to make a purchase, the payment is supported by Acapture’s award winning payment platform and completed entirely within the VR environment. Webshops created with this application can be accessed by consumers via their smartphone at the lowest-priced headsets available. Moreover, the webshop solution unifies the consumer touch points, gathering the shopping journey data from all online, offline, mobile and virtual channels, and creating a complete overview of the consumer shopping patterns meant to optimize the ecommerce solutions available for merchants.

“This is an exciting moment for Boatsters,” said Nick Gelevert, Boatsters CEO, “and a ground-breaking moment for commerce. The VR channel was the missing piece from our offering. We provide not just products, but real world experiences and VR allows our buyers to test that experience in a way no other channel can. With Acapture’s application, we can see how long which consumers browse which products and segments of our catalogue, providing a new level of insight into their shopping journey and allowing us to adjust our process, ultimately leading to higher conversions.”

“Since we launched Acapture,” said Rudolf Booker, Acapture CEO, “we’ve dedicated ourselves to providing the complete omnichannel payment solution meant to maximize revenues for merchants. With this application, we’re taking omnichannel to the next level, enabling an immersive shopping experience for buyers, while offering merchants customized ecommerce solutions optimized for their customers’ shopping needs.”

With 171 million active VR users projected by 2018, VR is very relevant to the present state of commerce, which is increasingly defined by experience. Almost 50 percent of worldwide shoppers see VR as the next step in the ultimate shopping experience, showing that consumers, particularly millennials and generation Z, are ready for virtual commerce. With consumers prepared for and demanding this new shopping channel, merchants are acknowledging the trend and integrating VR technology into their offering.

An in-depth analysis into virtual commerce and Acapture’s virtual reality webshop pilot can be found in Acapture’s latest whitepaper, Virtual Commerce, available here.