The Ballard+ Companion App: purchase directly from the catalog

People enjoy dreaming about new furnitures from home catalogs. But when the catalog is closed there is still no purchase done.

In order to increase this conversion rate, the Ballard Designs home furnishing company released a companion app for its paper catalog. It enables users to scan any page of the print to get additional information about the products and directly buy them with the mobile. Ballard’s catalog is now augmented!

A mixed advertising

A dedicated tab on the Ballard’s website invites you to discover the app. Explanations about what you can do and how to do it are rather clear. At app level you just need to select the right catalog and you are ready to scan!

On the other hand the catalog doesn’t feature any information or call-to-action about the app. As the catalog is the heart of the process it would have been great to make people aware from it too!

Still room for improvement

The app features an augmented reality scanner. It can work off-line to ensure a fast recognition regardless of the network quality. But the user interface is not cool as the scanner uses pictures tracking. It is uneasy to remain pointed on the page when you want to clic on a product.

The scanner only recognizes entire pages. In order to select products, you are expected to scan the whole page. We at Moodstocks think it’s a smart idea for scenes but it would be better to scan products themselves in pages with grids.