The commercial potential of DeepZoom

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[use your mouse of the + and - signs top left to zoom in on the Paul Smith logo on the handkerchief. you'll get the full effect...also take a look at the metal on the umbrella and the bottom left of the wallet where you'll even see Made in Italy embossed]

My friend Paul Dawson from Conchango delivered a great session at MIX08 recently where he talked about end to end experiences and gave a great insight in to Virgin Galactic along the way. As I thought about howDeepZoom is going to change the web I remembered a comment from his session.

Just towards the end of the session he mentioned the fashion brand Oli and a guest in the audience (presumably from Oli) mentioned that the interactive nature of that site has shown a higher conversion rate from browsers to buyers. Double in fact. That's monumental for the web.

It got me thinking about stuff I don't buy online that maybe I'd like to, or even like to just explore more. My friends know I'm a big fan of Paul Smith and what I love about many of his pieces is the attention to detail on stitching or perhaps colouring using his famous multistripe design. I can almost guarantee that with DeepZoom on a website like Paul Smith or others I'd buy more stuff. So let's do some quick maths based purely on assumptions:

  1. Assumption #1 - a popular online store gets say, 10,000 visitors per month
  2. Assumption #2 - only 10% buy something
  3. Assumption #3 - average purchase price is £50
  4. Calculation #1 - £50k per month turnover from the website
  5. Assumption #3 - adding DeepZoom will make 20% buy something
  6. Assumption #4 - average purchase price rises to £100
  7. Calculation #2 - £200k per month turnover from the website
  8. Calculation #3 - DeepZoom = 4 fold increase in sales

this is real napkin maths of course and I have no idea how accurate those figures are but doing a quick straw poll of one (my other half) she looks at Net-a-Porter quite often but has *never* bought anything from the site. Mainly as she likes to look at items and try them on but having shown her DeepZoom she thinks there is a strong likelihood this would change.