Revolutionizing the Future of Retail with No-Code Virtual Showroom Creation Platform
Founder: Adhyan Mangal
Metadrob was named in our “Innovative Companies to Watch in 2023” list, as a part of this recognition, we interviewed Adhyan and have featured him in our magazine. You can read our in-depth feature on Metadrob here, Enjoy reading!
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About Metadrob:
Metadrob is a virtual e-commerce store creation platform that enables retailers to build an interactive 3D virtual e-commerce store according to their brand requirements and specifications. It provides digital showroom templates for store owners to choose from to showcase their stores in a digital space. The platform is built on the latest technology and offers a simple drag-and-drop interface that does not require coding.
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The Metadrob Story
The retail industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and the pandemic has accelerated this shift towards e-commerce. With traditional brick-and-mortar stores facing unprecedented challenges, businesses are exploring innovative solutions to attract and retain customers in the digital age. One such promising solution is Metadrob- a web-based e-commerce-enabled virtual showroom creation tool for retailers, which promises to revolutionize the way we shop online.
Founded by Adhyan Mangal, a young entrepreneur with a passion for innovation and a background in augmented and virtual reality, Metadrob was born out of a desire to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping experiences.
Adhyan’s idea stemmed from his own experience during the pandemic when he found himself spending more time on e-commerce websites than physical stores. However, he noticed that the lack of access to try on products and receive proper assistance from sellers hindered his ability to make online purchases.
Adhyan’s realization led him to conduct extensive research and discover that many people share his struggle, with e-commerce sales only accounting for a meager 17% of in-store sales. It was then that he set out to find a solution to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping experiences and provide consumers with a way to have the best of both worlds. The result was Metadrob, a revolutionary virtual showroom platform that allows retailers to showcase their products in an immersive and interactive way, giving customers the ability to see, interact, try on, and buy their favorite products from the comfort of their own homes.
At its core, Metadrob is a next-generation virtual showroom platform. It allows retailers to build an interactive 3D virtual e-commerce store according to their brand requirements and specifications. With Metadrob, creativity is limitless, whether one chooses a virtual template to start with or starts from scratch, either way, one can make and change their virtual store as creatively as one want. The platform is very user-friendly, and the steps for creating a virtual showroom are easy to follow. Customers can access the virtual stores on the retailer’s website or application.
Metadrob‘s Key Differentiator
Metadrob is the first platform to offer retailers the ability to create their own showrooms. While some virtual store creation platforms exist, they do not provide the same level of control, advanced features, and customization freedom as Metadrob. Retailers have to pay them a significant amount of money to get their store customized. This leaves small and medium-sized retailers out in the cold, unable to compete with their larger counterparts.
Adhyan inferred that “With our easy-to-use platform, any retailer can create their virtual showroom, regardless of their technical knowledge or budget. Existing competitors in the market only target larger retailers with substantial budgets to invest in this technology. However, Metadrob is unique in its mission to make virtual showrooms accessible to retailers of all sizes and industries. By doing so, Metadrob aims to level the playing field and allow smaller businesses to compete with those of larger corporations.”
“With Metadrob, Retailers can have complete control over their virtual store, allowing them to customize every aspect of the shopping experience for their customers”
Metadrob Lets You Build Your Virtual Showroom in Minutes
Creating a virtual retail store on Metadrob is a breeze, without the need for any coding knowledge. This means that retailers can set up their own virtual stores in just a few clicks, saving both time and money in the process. Metadrob also offers a range of templates to choose from, making it easy to get started and get your store up and running in no time.
“Our platform is designed to make the process of creating a virtual showroom as simple as possible, so retailers can focus on what matters most – selling their products.”
To get started you just need to sign up on the platform, once you’ve registered, you can choose where you want to deploy your virtual showroom, whether it’s on the web or in the metaverse. From there, you can select your industry and browse through a variety of templates that suit your brand.
From there, it’s a matter of dragging and dropping elements from the content library to create your showroom. You can upload your products, add descriptions, and customize the layout until you’re satisfied with the result. Once everything is in place, you’re ready to publish your virtual store and showcase your products to potential customers.
Outstanding Salient Features of Metadrob
Metadrob offers a range of outstanding features that distinguishes it from its competitors. One such feature is the multiplayer showroom, where customers can visit virtual showrooms with their family and friends. This allows for a more engaging and interactive shopping experience, making it fun for everyone involved.
Metadrob’s Sales Representative Avatar, multiplayer showroom, and gaming zone are unique features that are not offered by any other competitor, providing retailers with unparalleled opportunities to engage with their customers and create personalized, interactive shopping experiences.
In addition, Metadrob provides retailers with the ability to have their sales representatives present in the virtual showroom through Sales Representative Avatar. This helps retailers provide a more personalized experience for their customers, as they can assist them in their shopping journey just as they would in a physical store. Other features include:
No Code Required – Build Your Virtual Showroom with Ease
One of the biggest advantages of Metadrob is that it requires no coding knowledge. Retailers can easily create their own virtual showroom by simply dragging and dropping elements from the platform’s content library.
Virtual Try-On – The Real-Life Shopping Experience
Metadrob’s Virtual Try-On feature allows customers to virtually try on products before making a purchase, providing a real-life shopping experience while eliminating the need to visit a physical store. This feature is powered by state-of-the-art technology that accurately captures a customer’s body measurements and overlays them with the virtual product to show how it would look on them.
Personalized Product Recommendations – Tailored to Your Customers
Metadrob uses AI to offer personalized product recommendations to customers, based on their browsing and purchase history. This feature provides a more tailored shopping experience and helps retailers increase their sales.
Retail Gamification – Boost Engagement and Sales
Metadrob’s Gaming Zone feature adds an element of fun and excitement to the shopping experience. Retailers can offer customers to earn rewards and discounts by participating in games and challenges, increasing engagement and ultimately boosting sales.
Feature Area – Direct Customer Attention to Your Best Products
Metadrob’s Feature Area allows retailers to showcase their best products in the ideal spots to grab the customer’s attention. This feature is designed to increase sales by highlighting the most popular or high-margin products.
Ease of Store Expansion – Choose from 1000+ Metadrob Store Templates
Metadrob offers a range of customizable templates that allow retailers to choose the perfect design for their virtual store. With over 1000 options to choose from, expanding your virtual store has never been easier.
Metadrob uses the latest technology, including three.js technology, which is the fastest-ever technology for the web. This technology ensures that the virtual stores created by retailers on the platform are optimized for the best possible shopping experience for customers.
Affordable Virtual Showrooms for All: Metadrob’s Unique Pricing Model
Metadrob offers a SaaS-based pricing model with three different plans for retailers and an additional plan for marketing and third-party agencies. Compared to other virtual store creation platforms in the market, Metadrob’s pricing is low and affordable, making virtual showrooms accessible to all retailers, not just the big players.
Unlike other platforms that offer a service, Metadrob allows retailers the freedom to make changes in their showrooms by themselves, without the need for additional service fees. However, some retailers may have unique requirements that require additional customization options. To meet these needs, Metadrob offers customization services that may incur additional costs.
Looking to the future, Metadrob has plans to introduce another pricing plan for retailers with 1000+ products, but currently, there are no plans to change the pricing.
Addressing Customer Concerns: Ensuring Security and Support on Metadrob’s Platform
Retailers transitioning to virtual stores on Metadrob’s platform may have some concerns, such as security, data privacy, and ease of use. To address these concerns, Metadrob has implemented several measures.
Security Measures and Data Privacy
Metadrob has implemented several measures to protect customer data, including secure payment methods such as SSL encryption and 3D secure authentication. Additionally, it has installed fraud detection software to detect and monitor suspicious activities.
Adhyan stated that “We use cloud-based storage to ensure customer data is stored securely and protected from unauthorized access. The team is also developing a data-privacy policy to comply with different international regulations, which will specify the collected data types, storage methods, and authorized personnel.”
Ease of Adaptation and User-Friendliness
To ensure ease of use, Metadrob has benchmarked itself against popular platforms like Shopify and Canva. The company has also tested its prototype with retailers to understand their reservations and make the product more user-friendly.
Metadrob provides a grid-based editing system, which is designed to simplify the editing process and make it more intuitive for users. This system allows retailers to easily customize the layout and design of their virtual store without requiring advanced technical skills.
Efficient performance Tracking & Analysis
Metadrob provides retailers with the ability to track and analyze customer behavior in real time. The platform offers a dashboard with three levels of analytics based on the subscription plan chosen by the retailer. The analytics range from basic metrics such as the number of customers in the store, their time spent, and the frequency of product interactions to detailed user journey tracking and location-based analysis. This allows retailers to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and optimize their Virtual Showrooms for better engagement and conversion rates.
Unique Marketing Functionalities
Metadrob provides retailers with the ability to market their virtual stores just like any other website. Retailers can utilize standard SEO, PPC, social media campaigns, and email marketing to drive traffic to their virtual showrooms.
In addition to these standard marketing methods, Metadrob also offers several unique functionalities to help retailers take their marketing game to the next level. For example, retailers can host virtual events such as webinars, product launches, and live demos within their virtual showrooms. They can invite industry experts and influencers to speak and interact with the audience, creating a unique and immersive customer experience.
Retailers can also incentivize referral marketing by offering discounts, free products, or access to exclusive/new products to customers who refer their friends and family to the virtual showroom. The immersive customer experience provided by the virtual showroom is likely to generate positive word-of-mouth recommendations, further enhancing the retailer’s reach and reputation.
Customer Support
Metadrob offers several channels of communication for retailers and customers to get in touch with its support team. Retailers and customers can use AI chatbot, WhatsApp, or email to reach out to the support team. Additionally, Metadrob provides a comprehensive knowledge base and tutorials.
Metadrob’s Achievements so far and Exciting Partnerships
Metadrob’s flexibility and innovative features have led it to quickly gain traction in the retail industry. The platform is still in the testing phase, but Metadrob has already started working with some prominent retailers like Phillips Signify and Arjiv Exports, creating virtual showrooms that meet their specific needs.
Metadrob has achieved some significant milestones in the past few months. They won the Global Student Entrepreneur Award at Jaipur Chapter and accelerated for EO GSEA Nationals.
They were also nominated as one of the top five finalists for the Technology of the Year Award at the Smart Retail Tech Expo, ExCel London.
Metadrob was one of the top three finalists for Aegis Graham Bell Awards for Innovation in Retail and was recognized as one of the top 100 startups in Southeast Asia by Lemon Ideas India. Additionally, they are part of the XR Acceleration Program by Meta in association with FITT, IIT, and received a Grant from Meta of Rs. 20,00,000.
Metadrob has formed partnerships with some leading organizations to expand its reach and better serve its clients. They are in association with Meta for the XR acceleration program in India, and they are part of Nvidia’s Inception Program.
Powering Virtual Store Creation and Management: The Technology and Infrastructure Behind Metadrob’s Platform
Metadrob’s platform is built on a robust technology stack that allows retailers to easily customize their virtual stores, add 3D models of their products, set up pricing, and track and analyze their store’s performance. At the backend, the platform uses the MERN stack, while the front end is built on Fiber and Three.js, making store creation and management a breeze even for those without coding or design skills.
As the platform grows and attracts more users, Metadrob is focused on scalability and performance. Metadrob has a roadmap of technology and infrastructure updates in the works. These include improving the 3D engine for higher fidelity graphics, enhancing backend infrastructure for scalability and performance, and introducing new features to further improve the virtual store creation and management experience. The company plans to implement cloud-based load balancing and caching services to handle large amounts of traffic, and automated monitoring and alerting systems to detect and resolve issues quickly.
Meet the Team Behind Metadrob: A Tale of Unity, Creativity, and Motivation
Behind the success of Metadrob lies a team of passionate individuals who have put in their heart and soul to make it a reality. Together, the Metadrob team is a diverse and talented group of professionals who bring a range of skills and expertise to the table. Their collective efforts and dedication have been instrumental in the success of the company thus far, and they continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in the AR/VR industry.
Their team is composed of 10 highly skilled professionals who work together to bring the company’s vision to life. At the forefront of the technical team is Shashaank Singh, who serves as the Technical Head. He oversees a team of three developers and two 3D modellers, bringing over eight years of experience in the AR/VR domain and a strong expertise in Unity to the table. He is a hardcore coder, well-versed in documentation and team-building skills, making him an essential asset to the team.
“Abhinesh Bhadoria is our Creative Head, responsible for designing the UI/UX of our tool, marketing creatives, and customized Virtual Showrooms. With his creative vision, Abhinesh brings life to our projects, and his designs never fail to impress our clients” said Adhyan.
Aditi Mangal is the Marketing Head who leads a team of 3 and oversees the social media, exhibitions, and retail-focused strategies. Her leadership has helped Metadrob reach a wider audience and achieve our marketing goals.
Vaishali, the HR Head, plays a crucial role in managing the team’s policies and team-building activities. She ensures that the team remains highly motivated and has all the necessary resources to achieve their targets.
Finally, Kanika Pareek manages client projects and oversees all the support needed for showroom creation. With her keen eye for detail and exceptional project management skills, she ensures that every client’s needs are met, and their expectations are exceeded.
As we continue to grow and innovate, we remain committed to our values of unity, creativity, and motivation, always putting our clients’ needs first. – Adhyan
At Metadrob, we aspire to be the leading platform for creating Virtual Showrooms with unparalleled strength and robustness. Our culture revolves around continuously upskilling our team members by providing them with access to online courses and encouraging them to teach each other new skills. To facilitate this, we dedicate an hour each day to learning and development for all our team members.
“We strongly believe in creating an environment of mutual respect and equality, where every member is valued and feels like a part of our family rather than just an employee. Our team culture is built on trust, open communication, and a shared passion for delivering high-quality solutions to our clients” inferred Adhyan.
Metadrob’s Future Plans: Revolutionizing Retail with Multiplayer and VR Technology
Metadrob is constantly innovating and introducing new features to help retailers market, promote, and track their virtual stores. Currently, the team is working on improving their multiplayer platform and introducing more games in the showroom to enhance user satisfaction and engagement.
Looking ahead Metadrob envisions turning their web tool into an application that can be accessed and used through apps in the VR play store. As retail shifts from e-commerce to 3D commerce, Metadrob wants to make it affordable for retailers of all sizes and industries to create their Virtual Showrooms and provide the best retail tech available to make the customer experience seamless and as real as possible.
Metadrob’s future plans also involve building a community for retail technology that can be readily deployed on the platform and used by retailers, ensuring the best solutions in the long run as all upgraded retail technology can become part of their platform.
