Augmented reality for small business ecommerce on a budget

What AR costs a ten-product web shop, which parts you can do yourself, what to pay for and when to wait.

By CharpstAR · 4 Oct 2023 · Updated 22 Sept 2026

OCT2023

Augmented reality for small business ecommerce on a budget

A shop with ten products and a few hundred euros of marketing budget for the quarter can show its products in AR. The budget goes almost entirely on the 3D models, because the AR delivery is built into the phones.

What AR delivery costs on Android and iPhone

Showing AR from a web page needs no app and no licence.

On Android, Google's Scene Viewer opens a 3D model in the camera from an ordinary web link, on any ARCore device running Android 7.0 or later. On iPhone and iPad, AR Quick Look does the same in Safari from iOS 12 onwards. Both are built into the operating system. The `` web component that drives most implementations is open source and free.

The remaining costs are the 3D models and about an hour of someone's time to add a snippet to the product template.

What a 3D model costs

In our experience one production-quality model of a simple hard good with clean geometry costs in the low hundreds of euros as a one-off, or a monthly fee if you want it maintained, hosted and optimised. Our own pricing starts at 10 dollars per product per month on Basic, on a twelve-month term with a minimum of 100 variants, and 20 dollars per model per month on the Value tier with a twenty-four month term. Those plans start at 100 variants, which is more than a ten-product shop has, so for a shop that size the route is the free first product and then a quote for the rest. The minimums exist because most of the work is the production pipeline itself, so small volumes cost more per unit.

Shopify's own guide puts custom AR app development at 30,000 to 50,000 dollars for basic functionality and up to 300,000 for complex work, and prebuilt AR apps at around 39 dollars a month. The first figures are for building an app, which a product page showing AR doesn't need.

A plan for a ten-product shop

Start with one or two products, chosen where size or material makes people hesitate and the order value covers the cost. A 900 euro cabinet qualifies on both counts.

Several suppliers, us included, build a first model free. Put it on your best-selling product for a month and compare conversion and returns with a similar product that has no model.

Fix the product page first. Accurate dimensions, photos in real rooms with a familiar object for scale, an accurate material description and a clear returns policy deal with the same doubts AR deals with, and they cost nothing.

Phone photogrammetry gives you a rough but usable mesh in an afternoon. Making it look like your product on a white page takes a 3D artist. If you have the skills and the time, the tools are easy to get hold of now. If you don't, the model will look worse than your photos.

When to wait

Small, cheap or impulse products raise no question AR can answer. Traffic so low that a good week and a bad week look the same can't show the effect either way. A product page that hides the shipping cost or forces shoppers to create an account at checkout should be fixed first. Baymard's 2026 list of 50 studies puts average cart abandonment at 70.22 percent, with extra costs at checkout cited by 40 percent of shoppers and forced account creation by 18 percent.

When it makes sense

The case is clear if you sell things people put in a room or wear on their face, and one extra sale a month would cover the cost.

That is why furniture, lighting, heating and eyewear tend to adopt it first.

What a good setup looks like on a small site

Speed matters most. Google recommends models under 10 MB for Scene Viewer, with a limit of 100,000 triangles and 30,000 to 50,000 as the ideal range, and Shopify suggests around 4 MB for a product page model. Ask whoever builds your model for the file size and triangle count before you accept it.

After that, place the 3D viewer in the main image area instead of a tab, give the AR button a clear label, and check that the model matches the product you ship.

The cheapest next step

Pick your best-selling product and send it to us for a free model. Anything beyond that first product is quoted against our pricing, and what we build is listed.