This makes the home furnishings giant one of the first retailers to use Facebook's 3-D posts to showcase its product lines.

Wayfair Inc. on Tuesday rolled out a new way for consumers to interact with its products on Facebook by posting its first 3-D post in the social network’s news feed.

That makes the home furnishings giant, No. 16 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 500, among the first retailers to use 3-D posts. These messages enable consumers to see and interact with a digital object from all sides from within the Facebook news feed.

“[3-D posts] are instantly responsive to scroll and touch, making content pop off the screen,” writes Aykud Gönen, a Facebook product manager, in a blog post. [They] also open the door for a future where people can bring interesting objects and experiences with them across AR, VR, mobile and web—whether it’s your favorite game and movie characters, architectural models or museum artifacts, all the way to fully interactive scenes.”

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Wayfair aims to use the format, which is free, to share items from its 3-D-model library of furniture and décor to consumers “at a mass scale,” says a spokesman for the retailer. “Without having to leave the Facebook news feed, consumers can seamlessly interact with Wayfair furniture up close and view it from every angle with their fingertips.”

Wayfair isn’t new to augmented reality, virtual reality and 3-D modeling, having worked on these technologies since 2015. Wayfair launched its augmented reality app in June 2016 and has gradually scaled the number of 3-D SKUs available to “tens of thousands.”

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