The Virtual Shopping Mall

Technologies are rapidly growing day-by-day. Today, the power of internet and virtualizations has a great impact on how businesses are run across the world. The internet breakthrough has enabled the chances to close a business deal with no national or time boundaries. This brings a new concept from shopping center into cyber world branded as Virtual Mall.

Virtual Mall is an online shopping centre that offers wide range of products with various merchants. In the world of online stores, Virtual Mall distinguished with other online shopping sites as it enables multiple merchants to sell under the same roof. The Virtual Mall designed to be setup fairly quickly with ease and user friendly interface. One of the demos from the virtual mall was designed using unity web player.

Initially, the Virtual Mall website allows user to create a character in the virtual 3D shopping mall. The mall will generate the character as a representation of the user. With the character created, the user will be able to move around in the mall and explore it just like a real life shopping mall.

The classifields is where all sellers of every item come together. In addition to the standard listings, sellers can also list their items for sale in specialty shops, buy now shops, auctions, private sellers lists,and more. There are literally tens of thousands of listings on Shoppok that can be found by using our search tools, so get searching! We\’ll provide more comprehensive resources as the trends continue to evolve. You can also find more information on product prices here.

In the Virtual Mall, the user wonders around controlling the character in a 3^rd person view. This seems like a video game, but the more interesting aspect about the Virtual Mall is that, unlike real-life shopping where you have to walk step-by-step from one shop to another, in the Virtual Mall you can view several shops at once. IOI City Mall Putrajaya is an example of large scale implementation of virtual shopping malls. The mall\’s interior spaces is so huge, it\’s nearly impossible to explore it under a day.

The question now is how to describe the experience of being inside the Virtual Mall? First, the user enters a shop (e.g. Rolex) or stands in front of it  (image on the right). Then, a webpage will pop-up showing information about the shop such as a list of products available for sale. Basically, this is how Virtual Mall works. However, the most notable feature of the Virtual Mall is the 3D art gallery. After entering the art gallery, a webpage opens where the user can browse and buy different artworks. While exploring the mall, the user can continue shopping without interrupting the purchases. Merchants can read this about Google Merchant Center here if they wish to know how they can upload products and make them available on the world’s largest search engine including this Virtual Mall.

Though seems promising, the Virtual Mall is still under development. The developers are currently exploring several real-life malls to gain inspiration from them. It may take a while before the Virtual Mall is officially opened to public.

For more information: virtual e shopping.

Edward Edward is a second year IT student from UCSI university. He recently completed his first internship at Datum.