3D for e-commerce3 min read

A short history of AR in e-commerce, 2017 to 2025

ARKit and IKEA Place in 2017, ARCore, Quick Look and Scene Viewer, Shopify's 2020 numbers, the headsets and the end of Meta Spark, with a source for each date.

By CharpstAR · 4 Oct 2023 · Updated 7 Oct 2026

OCT2023

A short history of AR in e-commerce, 2017 to 2025

AR for shopping has been called the next big thing every year since 2017. Part of what was announced in those years is now the plumbing product pages run on, and part of it has been switched off. This is the sequence, with a date and a link for each step.

ARKit and IKEA Place in 2017

Apple shipped iOS 11 on 19 September 2017, and ARKit came with it. Apple's line was that it brought augmented reality to hundreds of millions of iOS devices. Until then, putting a virtual object into a camera view at the right size needed a printed marker on the floor or a specialist app. From iOS 11 the phone could find the floor by itself.

IKEA had its app ready a week before the release. It announced IKEA Place on 12 September 2017, built on ARKit and requiring iOS 11, with more than 2,000 products at launch and a stated scaling precision of 98 percent. The launch range was sofas, armchairs, footstools, coffee tables and the best-selling storage, products where the shopper's question is whether the thing fits.

ARCore on Android in 2018

Google announced ARCore 1.0 on 23 February 2018, with support on 13 phone models and a stated reach of 100 million Android devices. Developers could publish AR apps to the Play Store from that day.

For the five months in between, AR was iPhone-only, and a brand that wanted it had to ship an app the shopper downloaded first.

AR moves from apps to the web, 2018 to 2020

Apple's AR Quick Look opens a USDZ file in AR from Safari, Messages, Mail and Notes on iPhone and iPad, and now on Apple Vision Pro, from iOS 12 onwards, without an app. Apple has since added Apple Pay, custom banners and material variants to it.

Google's Scene Viewer does the same job on Android. It reads glTF 2.0 and GLB and can be launched from a web page. Our Scene Viewer entry shows what a product page has to carry for that.

On top of both sits model-viewer, a web component maintained by Google. It renders a 3D model in the page and hands off to whichever AR system the device has. A 3D product page built on it is a few lines of HTML.

Shopify's merchant numbers in 2020

In September 2020 Shopify posted that interactions with products carrying 3D or AR content converted 94 percent more often than interactions with similar products without it. It has been the most quoted statistic in the industry since. It compares product interactions across merchant data, which isn't a controlled trial, and merchants tend to put models on their better products first.

Shopify's per-brand write-up gives a figure for one site. Shoppers on Rebecca Minkoff's site who viewed a product in AR were 65 percent more likely to buy than those who didn't.

Headsets launch and Meta Spark closes, 2024 and 2025

Apple Vision Pro went on sale in the United States on 2 February 2024 at 3,499 dollars. Samsung's Galaxy XR, the first Android XR device, launched at 1,799 dollars. Both are on sale with app stores.

Meta shut the Meta Spark platform on 14 January 2025. Third-party AR effects on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger stopped working that day, including the try-on filters agencies had built for brands between 2019 and 2023. Meta kept its own effects and moved its spending to glasses. AR on retailers' own product pages, in GLB and USDZ, was not affected.

Where web AR stands in 2026

Web AR on the product page is settled. Shoppers open it to check a size or a colour and close it again, the formats, GLB and USDZ, haven't changed in years, and the viewers ship with iOS and Android.