Virtual Reality's Effect on E-Commerce Business

Running head: VIRTUAL REALITY’S EFFECT ON E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
VIRTUAL REALITY’S EFFECT ON E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
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1VIRTUAL REALITY’S EFFECT ON E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................1
Problem Statement.................................................................................................................2
Research Questions............................................................................................................3
Research Methodology...........................................................................................................3
Introduction to the Management Report....................................................................................4
Critical Research Analysis and the related findings..................................................................4
Virtual reality and related opportunities................................................................................5
Virtual reality and its user experience enhancing nature.......................................................5
Threats related to the implementation of Virtual Reality.......................................................6
Differences between Conventional and Potential VR based Online Shops...........................7
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References................................................................................................................................10

2VIRTUAL REALITY’S EFFECT ON E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
Introduction
With its substantial growth in the industry, e-commerce has emerged to be a vital part
of life. The growth of the e-commerce industry can be well understood from the fact that
Walmart though being one of the largest retailers have been run over by Amazon. The
evolution of technologies has resulted in the shifting of the physical markets to virtual ones.
A significant amount of investment is done on the communication tools and technologies that
utilize the internet to the revenue of the firm and to gain the trust of its customers. The
technology used helps to enhance the usability of the shopping websites and helps
maintaining and increasing the trust of the customers (Martono et al. 2016). The platforms
are user friendly as the customers can post their feedback and the reviews updated by the user
help the new customers to know the product better. Recommender system is an advanced
search technology that recommends products to the customers based on their previous history
of purchasing (Parise, Guinan and Kafka, 2016). The predictions made by the recommender
system help the site to post relevant suggestions for the particular user. The technique helps
those users who are clueless about how to search for an available product. The various
researches that have been conducted claim that Amazon has earned 33% of its revenue from
the recommendations made by the recommender system. The shopping platforms are
investing more on such tools and techniques, which are not only aiding them in increasing
their sales but are also a help for the users.
Problem Statement
Virtual reality is no more restricted to the world of gaming and entertainment industry
rather it has spread its roots within the e-commerce industry as well. The role that virtual
reality can play for medium, small and large-scale industries is yet to be discussed and
investigations made on what will be the future position of e-commerce when supported by

3VIRTUAL REALITY’S EFFECT ON E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
this technology. The usage of virtual reality in the arena of e-commerce is confined to
research work that requires investment of lot of efforts (Wong et al. 2015). The applicability
of the technology to the e-commerce sector and the process by which it can help improve
customer’s experience needs to be analyzed. Thus, the following research will consider the
topic that how in future virtual reality will affect the e-commerce industry.
Research Questions
The questions that need to be researched based on the above scenario are as follows:
 What could be the possible impacts of the virtual reality technology online shopping
platforms?
 How can the technology enhance user experience and increase the e-commerce
websites usability?
Research Methodology
In the sphere of gaming and entertainment, virtual reality has already made its
presence but in case of online shopping platforms, its contribution is yet to be analyzed. As
the concept of the technology is just in its infant phase and is limited to the field of research
only, the existing evidences on the same can help proceed with the analysis (Stoyanova et al.
2015). The methodology includes investigating the available literature and it will act as a
source of secondary research. The current trends and updated knowledge on this specific
domain will be portrayed. The research that will be conducted based on secondary data that
will focus on analyzing the qualitative nature of the data available from different sources. The
existing literature can be used for studying the topic in depth (Huang et al. 2016). The
literature and considered to qualitatively analyze the topic are from online repositories,
libraries and certain books. The secondary data has been referred to in order to carry out the
research.
The research is supported by secondary data and it re-analyzes reviews critically and
interprets the previously available data concerning this domain. The sources of the data are
the work of the academics, researchers and business experts. The secondary research is all