This blog post was first published on 14 March 2023 and received a comprehensive update on 5 April 2024.
As part of our Feature Focus series, today’s your chance to find out all about the video shopping feature Digital Sales Rooms – the cutting-edge tool for providing personal, interactive advice. This easy-to-use approach saves time for your customers and sales staff alike.
Why was this feature developed?
Shoppers love dropping by their local stores to get advice in person. How can we take this USP of brick-and-mortar retail and transfer it to your online business? The answer: Digital Sales Rooms. This innovative feature from Shopware’s developers lets you create interactive live video events as a B2C merchant – and forge unique connections with your customers within the B2B or D2C space. No matter how you use Digital Sales Rooms, personal advice is always at its heart.
What are the benefits?
Shopware’s Digital Sales Rooms can be used in all kinds of powerful ways – you’ll love the impact it has!
Integrate the service seamlessly into your online store
Broadcast customer-focused, interactive live video events around the globe
Provide personal consultations for VIP customers
Host exclusive events for selected customers
Help save time for your customers and sales staff alike
Generate a sustainable brand experience for your customers
Use integrated analysis tools to offer relevant products
Run promotions that create crucial incentives to buy
Target your advice more precisely, minimizing cancellations and returns
All of the above will enhance your business’s efficiency – but that’s not the only perk of using Digital Sales Rooms. It’s also a great way to get social media influencers on board: Invite them to organize an interactive live-shopping event directly on your ecommerce page, for instance.
Here's what the Guided Shopping storefront looks like for you as a merchant when you host a shopping event. During this time, you can add products to the shopping cart for your customers.
How to use the feature
Digital consultations based on Digital Sales Rooms can take different forms depending on what your customers want.
Interactive live events
An interactive, guided live event is a great choice for an exclusive 1:1 consultation or for providing advice to a selected group of customers. At the event, you showcase products relevant to the target group at hand, supported by the integrated analysis tool, which helps ensure the products you’re picking are a perfect match. This format is also ideal for items that need a little explanation. By interacting directly with your customers, you can answer their questions as they arise and boost their motivation to make a purchase with tempting promotions. They enjoy a personal, strengthened customer experience – which, in turn, reinforces their brand loyalty.
Individual presentations (self-guided mode)
Digital Sales Rooms isn’t just about hosting live events. You can also use it to create personalized presentations for your customers, which they can access via a link whenever they like, clicking through your pre-prepared product presentation step by step. If they like a product, they can add it to their favorites or shopping cart there and then.
Technical requirements for Digital Sales Rooms
As a user of the self-hosted version of Shopware 6 Beyond, Digital Sales Rooms is ready and waiting for you to use. If you’d like to use this new feature, you’ll need a daily.co account (API key) and an active Mercure service; your developer/administrator will set up both of these services for you using our developer documentation. Here's the latest update: We've moved beyond Shopware PWA to Shopware Composable Frontends, streamlining integration processes significantly. Find out more about configuring Digital Sales Rooms in our Shopware documentation.
What other highlights are we working on?
As you already leverage the benefits of Digital Sales Rooms, we are working to advance this feature further for you. Look forward to:
Tracking options during presentations, opening up more marketing automation possibilities
Improved User Experience
The ability for your customers to directly request appointments with the seller from a Self-Guided Presentation
Your customers can request a quote as an alternative to making a direct purchase at checkout
Learn even more about Digital Sales Rooms and get started
Get started today and boost customer loyalty by personalizing your shopping experience to the max. We’d be more than happy to provide you with a personal product demo on request.
