Is Shopware 6 Guided Shopping a competitor for offline retail?

The function was launched at the Shopware Community Day 2021. We think that Guided Shopping could be a real rival for local retailers. The advantage for local retailers is often that they can offer personal advice. With the extension of Guided Shopping, this personal advice is now also available remotely. Customers can now shop and be guided from the comfort of their own home. The Guided Shopping function fits perfectly into the landscape of your store and works with the existing e-commerce infrastructure. In the end, the goal of Guided Shopping is to support the customer in making an active buying decision. Finding suitable products together boosts the user experience.

The key idea of Guided Shopping is the communication of a guide with the customer. Through an online presentation. This means "real human contact" - just online. Clients can arrange a live appointment via chat at your store. They can then meet the guide in the store via video. The guide has the possibility to move through the store. During this process, the customers can permanently track where the guide is. At the same time, the guide has the option of highlighting individual elements in the store for the users.

This means: Guided Shopping offers you the possibility to organize interactive live video events. Without having to change the presentation tool or the online store. 

Therefore, it can be said that Guided Shopping is perfectly suited to advise your customers. Let me mention here that this function is ideal for online stores that offer advice-intensive product lines. With advice-intensive products, you can create the right concept of your Guided Shopping concept. This way, you can create added value and offer your customers a special shopping experience. 

An Example for Guided Shopping from the Homepage of Shopware

For whom is Guided Shopping suitable?

Additionally it should be said: Guided Shopping is only available to you if you use the Professional license of Shopware and Shopware PWA. There are also a few other technical requirements. For technical reasons, Guided Shopping is currently only available with Shopware's self-managing solution. Therefore, we have to tell you that it' s currently only suitable for larger stores. However, this may change in the future. After all, Guided Shopping is still in its beginning and there are already plans to extend it to other editions.

You don't know exactly what PWA is? Here you can find our article about Shopware PWA.

So, we want to give you a few scenarios where you can use Guided Shopping. 

1. Digital sales presentations
2. Kitchen planners can be used to design a fitted kitchen in a digital way. IKEA, for example, carries out such digital kitchen planning and navigates the customer through the store in the process.
3. Live Shopping Events with targeted product presentations

What are actually the advantages of Guided Shopping?

• Seamless integration into your IT landscape.
• Presentation of relevant products, through integrated analysis tools
• Increase confidence in your products and remove possible doubts
• Your customers ask their questions and get a answer
• Through the analysis tools you can offer product bundles and increase your revenue
• Your customers are something special. That's exactly how you advise them, in an exclusive video call.

How does the administration of Guided Shopping work? 

You can manage Guided Shopping via three areas in your backend. 

1. Appointments: In the Appointments section you can manage all data for the presentation. This includes, the user restrictions or necessary links for the presentation. 
2. Content: Here you integrate all Guided Shopping worlds
3. Presentation: Under Presentation you have the possibility to define the different types of your Guided Shopping experiences. So for example Live Call or Webinar

This process starts with a separate login of the guide and the customer. The guide has all options to carry out the Guided Shopping presentation through an admin panel. The guide can follow the entire purchase process up to the purchase of the items in the shopping cart. From the point "Checkout" the guide leaves.

Customers participate in the presentation after login. They can ask questions at any time. 

Conclusion: Is Guided Shopping a rival for the local retail?

We think Shopware Guided Shopping is a real milestone for the future online shopping experience. Currently, Guided Shopping cannot replace the retail trade. So, we' re looking forward to seeing how the feature develops in future.

Shopware released a Shopware TV episode about Guided Shopping. You can watch it here to get even more impressions: Shopware TV about Guided Shopping