3D Room Planner Benefits
Buying new furniture is stressful. You have to measure the available space, your car’s trunk, and the furniture itself. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way for customers to see how the furniture will fit before they buy it? There is, and it’s called a 3D Room Planner.
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Buying new furniture is stressful. You have to measure the available space, your car’s trunk, and the furniture itself. And there’s the added bonus of going to the furniture store, re-measuring, and jostling with people who are doing the exact same thing.
Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a way for customers to see how the furniture will fit before they buy it? There is, and it’s called a 3D Room Planner.
A 3D room planner is an innovative way to plan layouts for homes, offices, or any empty space you want to fill. This tool enables customers to visualize how furniture will look before making any purchases or renovations, allowing them to shop with confidence.
Merchants, e-shops, and anyone selling products online can also benefit from a 3D room planner. This article will explain the benefits of having a room planner and show some examples of what they can do. It will also provide some tips on using these tools effectively to get the best possible experience.
Taras Mykolayevych - Business Analytics Specialist
What is a 3D Room Planner?
According to Lead Interior Designer at Marxent, Natalia Zeiba, “a 3D room planner is a virtual modeling and visualization tool to help designers, architects, retailers, or consumers pre-create spaces: interiors, interior designs, or architectural plans to scale.” The planner, in essence, helps turn your ideas into reality.
It is also a major upgrade from a 2D room planner. While they both can be used as initial sketches by designers, 2D planners have a simple, flat bird’s eye view of the whole design. 3D planners take this core idea further.
They provide a 3D view of your space to allow you to visualize all aspects of the design, including colors, furniture, textures, and more. Users can adjust, adapt and view the design from various angles, while taking control of furnishings and decor.
Interior designers, home builders, and marketers alike can use 3D floor plan renderings to breathe life into their room designs.
Why Choose a Room Planner?
Even if you are confident in your spatial awareness skills, envisioning a fully-furnished space is challenging. 3D room planners enable you to get your ideas down, think them through, and make better decisions. Imagine how much this can help you visualize your options.
3D room planners specifically can instantly provide you with a feel for your design layout in a digestible manner. If you are not looking for technical details, this kind of planning is a great option if you’re an interior designer, an eCommerce marketer, or just remodeling a room.
The Anatomy of a 3D Room Planner
As stated before, 3D floor planners are a 3D view of your traditional 2D planner. They include aspects of a 2D planner, including detailed room layouts with walls and furnishings. Because they are in three dimensions, they can display the height, depth, and width of room layouts and all furnishings with colors, patterns, and textures.
Most 3D room planner tools are accessible from modern-day browsers. The software of each tool will include similar details regarding the ability to choose walls, carpeting, paint colors, windows, and more for each selected room. Some may also have back and front yard visualizations for a comprehensive view of your potential home.
After you have built your layout, you can select an angle to view it from and the software will automatically generate it. This allows you to adjust and rotate the viewing angle as much as you would like.
3D Floor Planner Benefits for Salespeople
3D floor planners aren’t just for interior designers. If you’re selling any kind of furniture—in-person or online—3D software can greatly impact all business channels.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits.
Improves the Customers’ Journey
3D floor planners allow online business owners to re-create the in-store experience and leverage ever-changing customer trends. This is a great opportunity for eCommerce owners in the furniture, cabinetry, or other home decor sectors. It enables your shoppers to see your product outside your storefront, promoting credibility, increasing sales and decreasing potential returns.
A 3D planner aids in the seamless integration of in-person and online shopping for bricks-and-mortar marketers. Customers can start projects at your store and pick up where they left online, accelerating the purchase journey.
Makes Building Catalogs Easy
All furniture retailers expect to provide a corpus of product options. Retailers are expected to have multiple images and detailed descriptions for each and every product in various colors. This can quickly become chaotic as your business continues to add more items, making it difficult to maintain and audit your catalog.
3D planners solve this issue. With it, salespeople can quickly itemize and transfer their products onto their site as 3D images. Once created, these 3D products can be adjusted to give users a view of all angles. After a product is created, it can be used, reused, and manipulated forever.
Supports Great Omnichannel Customer Experiences
3D room planner tools can lead to improved omnichannel customer experiences for one major reason: ease of access.
Effective omnichannel strategies both allow customers and salespeople to engage and allow customers to interact with all shopping processes. 3D room planners, along with CRMs and product catalogs, improve customer and marketer interactions. They can work together on projects in-store or online.
In addition, a 3D room planner can be accessed across multiple platforms, from computers to mobile devices. Marketers can take this a step further by building in-store kiosks that let customers test their designs, carrying the customer experience across different channels with ease.
Customer Analytics
By implementing 3D planning software in your store, you can obtain additional data about your customers’ behavior. This ranges from average costs of layouts and shopping carts and the most common items to data regarding individual customers’ patterns and preferences. This information provides you insight into your customers to personalize their experience. The more personalized your storefront is, the more your customers will interact with it and the more likely they are to buy something.
Reduced Cost of Sales
With a 3D room planner, marketers can reduce their overall costs and increase overall profits. This is because 3D software allows customers more information to make a purchasing decision, enabling them to make a choice they are happy with the first time around. This decreases the need for returns, enabling you to reduce delivery costs. This provides eCommerce store owners with additional cost savings.
3D Floor Planner Benefits for Your Customers
Whether a customer is looking to remodel their home or simply buy a sofa, 3D room planners can help them save time, money, and effort.
No Heavy Lifting
Anyone who has ever moved furniture around knows it’s not easy. Oddly shaped, monolithic pieces usually require more than two sets of hands to carry and, to test various layouts, they have to be moved again and again. The process is time-consuming and frustrating.
3D planners mean your customers never have to test layout ideas the hard way. They can make unlimited changes to any room in a few minutes. Hiring an interior designer can ease the amount of work that needs to be done, which means designers can create the design away from a client’s home and visit only when needed.
Cost-Efficient
Traditional interior design services can be great, but they are expensive. Online rendering services, on the other hand, have several free options.
Plus, virtual planning software allows people to test out endless furniture options. If there’s a chair or carpet pattern that someone likes, they can see how it looks in the room without paying anything. This saves money because your customers can now visualize every piece before purchase.
Stay at Home
Using a virtual room planner means a customer can work on their space from anywhere, at any time, instead of communicating back and forth with a designer or being in the physical room that’s being modified. With the ability to try out multiple colors and styles, people won’t have to go to the store to see the actual product in 3D or receive examples. They can just see how it looks in the 3D room planner.
Plus, your customer won’t need to coordinate times to meet with their designer. This lets your customer receive all the benefits of a traditional interior design service with fewer in-person meetings.
No More Mistakes
With traditional interior design services, making a mistake can cause issues with renovations down the line, leading to customers paying more and being disappointed with the end result.
With virtual room planners, making a mistake can be solved with the click of a button. Customers can try as many designs as they want before settling on one. Once they finally have a design, they can check it to make sure there are no errors. Using 3D rendering services, customers can ensure that they do not have to pay more and are happy with the end result.
Thousands of Options
Imagine that a customer wants to purchase a new dining table but has no clue what they want. With traditional designing services, they’d have to pay a hefty fee to try out various tables that they may not like when they arrive. With a virtual design service, they can test out every option as much as they’d like before purchasing, allowing them to make the best decision.
3D Room Planner: Reshaping the Furniture Industry
Salsita, a digital product company dedicated to providing excellent mobile and web solutions, recently created an amazing 3D room planner for Colijn IT. The result was a realistic, streamlined, and easy-to-use room layout planner that can be run in any modern web browser.
The room planner allows users to build rich room designs with a drag and drop interface and then view and rotate it in 3D. What's more, furniture can be configured in place in the room to try various options and see how they look and fit within the overall design.
Read more about Salsita and Colijn IT’s project here: 3D Room Planner: Reshaping the Furniture Industry.
