Augmented reality in the web store – a new era begins

In addition to the obvious advantages of eCommerce, there are a few challenges that online retailers are facing. The technical possibilities are still not mature enough to be able to recreate certain in-store experiences online.

For example, if we don’t know whether a jacket suits us or which size would be ideal for us, we simply order several versions of it. We do this in the hope that one will fit, knowing full well that this will mean having to go back to the post office with the returns at some point. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could try on the jacket virtually at home?

The disadvantages of buying furniture are even more obvious: we measure our living room at great expense, fight our way through our trusted furniture store on Saturdays with hundreds of like-minded people and choose a sofa, only to realize at home that it doesn’t fit as well as we thought in the artificial light of the furniture store. How practical it would have been to place the sofa in our living room on a trial basis!

Furniture retailers in particular recognized this problem years ago and took action: Möbel Pfister was the pioneer in Switzerland with “Atelier Pfister”. Various others followed suit, with the Swedish furniture giant’s “Ikea Place” app now the best known.

In addition to being able to place products at home before buying, customers also appreciate the opportunity to explore every detail of the product online – an area in which traditional product photography has its weaknesses. Both problems are accentuated for companies that dispense with a showroom or bricks-and-mortar retail altogether and use the online store as their only distribution channel.

The use cases for augmented reality in the shopping sector have therefore existed for a long time and the corresponding applications have been widely accepted by customers. However, the technology was still only available to companies with enough power to have a specific AR app developed.

With the latest advances in smartphone technology, those days are now over once and for all. From now on, 3D models can be easily integrated into any website via a web service and displayed directly in the browser.

What applies to buying clothes or furniture also applies to software development: the principle of one size fits all only applies in the rarest of cases. For this reason, web AR should not be seen as a replacement or displacement of eCommerce apps, but rather as a welcome addition to the range of possibilities.

While the use of a mobile app has undisputed advantages, some companies rely on a web-only strategy. This is exactly where the new Web-AR solution comes in.