June 1, 2026
AR has already proven its value in e-commerce — it lifts conversion and cuts returns. And yet most brands still treat it as a niche tool: something for specific categories or one-off marketing campaigns, not a core part of how they sell.
The hesitation mostly comes down to perception. Many businesses assume AR requires custom 3D models, an embedded AR viewer, cross-device support, catalog synchronization, and CMS integration. It can sound less like a simple website feature and more like a full-scale engineering project.
In practice, it’s much more manageable. Purpose-built AR platforms handle most of the heavy lifting, allowing brands to integrate AR without building everything from scratch.
AR experiences are delivered through phones and browsers — and that comes with real constraints. The same experience needs to work on an iPhone, on Android, across different browsers, with varying camera quality and processing power. In practice, that means fragmentation: different platforms require different technologies and formats.
Cross-platform support is one of the more underestimated AR challenges — handling it yourself means hiring developers and building a custom solution, which is where it genuinely gets complicated and expensive. But that's not the only path.
The simpler route is going with a platform that's already done the work. At VIZBL, we test across iOS and Android, and across device generations — so a customer on an older, lower-end device gets the same experience as someone on the latest flagship.
For AR to drive results rather than friction, it needs to integrate seamlessly into the shopping experience. That means thinking through a lot of edge cases:
Get any of these wrong, and the experience works against you — friction at this point costs you the customer entirely.
Most AR platforms have already worked through these questions and built the answers into their product. At VIZBL, we went a step further: rather than leaving store owners to figure out the UI themselves, we designed ready-to-use UI components and documented the integration process — so store owners can launch AR without a dedicated design or dev team
For desktop visitors, for example, we show a QR code that takes them straight into AR on their phone:
Without 3D models, there's no AR. That's the baseline requirement. And 3D modeling isn't like product photography: it requires different skills, different tools, and a different kind of specialist.
For retailers with hundreds or thousands of SKUs, that can feel like a serious bottleneck. Every product needs to be digitized, and at a quality standard that translates accurately in AR.
In practice, though, there are more options than it might seem:
Once you have 3D models, the next problem is keeping them running smoothly. These are heavy files — if they're slow to load, customers won't wait around. They also need to stay current: if the AR model doesn't match the product listing, customers notice — and so does your return rate. And as your catalog grows, onboarding new models should be seamless.
That's a whole new layer of infrastructure — with real costs and real maintenance overhead. It's also one of the challenges that surfaces late — only after the rest of the integration is already in place.
Most AR platforms take this off your hands entirely. Models live on dedicated servers built for fast delivery, and you get a dashboard to manage everything. At VIZBL, that's the object manager — upload new models, edit existing ones, remove what you don't need, all in one place.
Even for large retailers with thousands of SKUs, building AR infrastructure in-house is usually slower, significantly more expensive, and difficult to scale efficiently. Maintaining consistent 3D model quality across a large catalog is also a major operational challenge. In practice, working with a specialized AR platform is often the faster and more reliable option, since the underlying infrastructure, optimization, and workflows are already in place.
