Dive Brief:

• Amazon has introduced new AR shopping features for customers through its Room Decorator tool. The tool will help customers virtually style their home with furniture items from Amazon and its third-party sellers. It will allow customers to visualize multiple items at once in their space, and the customer's virtual room can be saved to an account for later editing.

• With Room Decorator, shoppers can place furniture in their room, view product recommendations and add products to their cart without leaving the AR experience. The tool is accessible on both mobile devices and desktops, and customers can switch between editing their saved room on either device.

• Furniture items are represented at scale and in high-definition. For now, the feature is available for half of iOS users. The remaining iOS users will be able to access it within the next couple of weeks, and it will be available for Android users in the next few months.

Dive Insight:

The Amazon Room Decorator tool is the company's most recent venture into augmented reality. The e-commerce giant launched an AR shopping tool for its iOS mobile app in 2017 that allowed users to virtually see items like electronics, small kitchen appliances and toys in their rooms.

The retailer went further into improving the furniture shopping experience in 2019, launching a virtual furniture showroom feature online that allowed shoppers to create a living room by saving different wall and floor colors, and then adding furniture and other products, like lamps, to flesh out the scene. It also allowed customers to move an entire room's products to checkout with an "Add to cart" button. 

The retailer's new Room Decorator features seem to combine those ideas to an extent, allowing customers to view multiple objects in their own living spaces via AR, and save rooms to be edited or purchased later through desktop or mobile.

"With the addition of Room Decorator tools, Amazon enhances its augmented reality feature to give customers an even more immersive shopping experience from the comfort of their own home, or on the go," Amazon said in a statement emailed to Retail Dive. "With access to the inspiring furniture styles available on Amazon, customers can do more than just imagine their dream rooms—they can visualize them to make more informed shopping decisions."

As Amazon gains ground in the furniture market, competitors have stepped up their tech tools. Other retailers, like Mountain Hardwear, Etsy, Ikea and Wayfair, have unveiled similar AR tools for shopping for furniture and decor. In 2017, Amazon also unveiled its own private label furniture lines and allowed third-party furniture sellers to set their prices.