“Wouldn’t it be great if … you could get behind the eyes of your online shoppers?”
Marc Foreman, 29th May, 2025
“Eye Tracking & eCommerce - together at last?”
In retail, and especially in shelf setups, visual engagement is paramount. If a customer can’t see it, they can’t buy it.
In the real world, retailers and category captains have long been aware of eye tracking technology for physical store trials, with wearable goggles enabling data collection about what grabs shoppers’ attention in-store. It’s not cheap, or easy, but it can generate useful insights which can be used to refine product visibility.
In eCommerce, not so much. Primarily because eCommerce is pretty much the same no matter what you’re buying, or from where. It uses the product grid – a fairly simple grid pattern to present products based on what it thinks you might like to buy or limited to the search criteria you’ve picked.
And yet there’s a niche area of shelf testing which occurs online and not in the physical store, using a panel of web respondents to ‘shop’ from interactive shelves. This data then goes on to help shelf planners improve the physical store setup.
So, this means there is, in fact, a working, proven template which isn’t only known about by retailers and manufacturers but actually relied upon to plan out in-store displays and has done so for years!
So, wouldn’t it be great if you could not only give your online customers a fabulous new shopping experience using those same interactive shelves, but you could also link it up to eye-tracking and actually use the ‘behind-the-shopper’s-eyes’ data to make those planograms – online and in-store – far more effective?
We believe the future of retail insight lies at the intersection of online shopping and physical stores, where 3D eCommerce environments and eye tracking actively contribute to improved physical store setups, and vice versa. A future where everyone, regardless of where they are or what device they use, can get an in-store experience showcasing your best shelf setups, and then help you make them even better.
Back From The Future …
First, let’s ground ourselves in what’s already possible today.
We mentioned that eye tracking is already used in closed testing environments.
Take, for example, the way the sporting goods retailer XXL used wearable eye tracking glasses to study real customer behaviour to improve in-store signage. Or how leading CPG brands use VR to test packaging in virtual supermarkets before a single box hits the shelf. With activity heatmaps and gaze mapping, we’re getting closer to understanding the subconscious drivers of purchase decisions.
Cool, for sure (unless you’re one of the guys drilling through every video to get the insights!), but here’s the downside: the equipment is expensive, cumbersome and relies on being worn by the shopper. These are limiting factors for mass adoption so, when the shopper lab has done the best job it can, retailers and brands push the winning shelves out to market and still find themselves crossing their fingers, as they keep a keen (and slightly nervous) eye on sales data.
Rinse and repeat (!).
In eCommerce, however, it’s a different story. Today we all have a high-quality camera looking right back at us as we shop our favourite online stores.
So why can’t we use that for eye-tracking?
And if we can use that, why not upgrade the shopper experience to interactive shelves and get insight on how well shelf designs are doing? Or even split new shelf designs across a customer base in real time and ditch the pre-testing altogether. Simply throw new shelf concepts out there and see which works best at actual – not faked – sales?
But what’s in it for the shopper? They’re letting you into their heads to map out wherever they look on the screen, but what do they get in return?
Picture this: A shopper visits your website, clicks the button for 3D interactive Shelves, and bam! They’re standing at the entrance to your flagship store. They walk in and follow the same route through as they do in the real world, browse the same shelves for the same products, and are tempted by other options as appropriate. They’re exposed not to dozens of products per ‘page’ but hundreds per ‘view’.
The bottom line is they don’t have to resort to a ‘favourites’ list or go digging through menu after menu for the stuff they need. It’s all there, laid out in front of them exactly in the way they’re familiar with. And, with proper incentivising via a rewards scheme, shoppers would earn additional benefits. Everyone wins.
“With eye tracking fully integrated into 3D retail spaces, insights teams could finally answer age-old questions with certainty: What truly attracts attention to which customer segment?”
Which displays are invisible to shoppers? How does the customer’s journey unfold, step by step, through a store – whether physical or virtual? Have we really got it right in our stores or do the eCommerce folks tell us a different story?
No more guesswork. Just data-driven design, powered by real human behaviour.
Now, you may also ask why we’re not seeing this sort of thing appearing everywhere we shop, and why instead we have ‘ye olde producte gridde’. The answer is technical, but simple: Product grid = easy; 3D store with eye tracking = hard.
There’s also the very human reason for not wanting to rock the boat. What we see today on our go-to eCommerce sites is the product of literally billions of pounds of investment by the retailer – often incorporating old legacy systems and software which were engineered 30+ years ago at the dawn of the commercial internet. Team members have come and gone, the system has grown, and it takes a brave individual to announce that there could be a better way!
This creates a level of inertia which is difficult to overcome. If the customer isn’t yelling, then why change?
So, to take the concept of next-generation shopping mainstream, the 3D store creation and management with all its shelf displays and interactions with both consumers and back-end inventory would need to be not only simple for the retailer to implement, but actually so transparent to their existing processes that they don’t even know it’s there. It just works.
Wouldn’t that be great!?
Marc Foreman is our Co-Founder, Co-CEO & Technical Director, looking forward to transforming pontification into thought leadership one of these days. He’s 56 years old, and is always grateful to be age-checked at the supermarket. Connect with Marc on Linkedin to explore the future of eCommerce, retail experiences, and a bunch of other stuff that has very little to do with either.