Web AR guide for e-commerce managers on cost and timing

What web AR is, what your team has to provide, how long a first phase takes, what it costs and how to judge a vendor.

By CharpstAR · 25 Sept 2023 · Updated 22 Sept 2026

Part of Augmented reality for furniture retail: the complete guide

SEP2023

Web AR guide for e-commerce managers on cost and timing

Web AR comes up in most e-commerce roadmaps at some point, usually as a line with no cost, timeline or staffing against it. The guide below fills those in for a first phase of 50 to 100 products.

What web AR is

Web AR means a shopper taps a button on your product page and the product appears in their camera view at real size, without installing an app. Both mobile operating systems have the viewer built in.

On Android, the button hands a glTF 2.0 or GLB file to Google's Scene Viewer, which needs an ARCore supported device running Android 7.0 or later with a current Google Play Services for AR. On iOS and iPadOS, it hands a USDZ file to AR Quick Look, which has shipped since iOS 12 and works in Safari. The phone runs the AR session, and your site provides the file and the link.

The same model also gives shoppers a product they can rotate in a browser viewer on any device, including desktop.

What your team has to provide

Web AR needs input from several people on your side before anything goes live.

Product data

Accurate dimensions for every product you want modelled, in one consistent unit. Wrong dimensions give a wrong model, and the shopper sees that error at full size in their room.

Reference material

Photographs from several angles including the back and underside, material and finish information, and CAD if you have it. Products with CAD are faster and cheaper to model.

Someone who can approve a model

A person who can look at a model and say "the frame is too thick" or "that walnut is too red". Expect a few minutes per product across one or two rounds of review. Projects without an owner for this step tend to stall at about 80 percent finished.

Front-end access

Someone who can add a viewer component to the product page template. On Shopify or similar this is usually small. Shopware works the same way with a script and a theme element; see the glossary entry on the configurator for Shopware. On a bespoke front end, budget a developer week or two for the template, poster handling, fallback behaviour and analytics events.

A realistic timeline

For a first phase covering 50 to 100 products, this is what we typically see.

Stage	Duration	Who does it
Scoping, product selection, data check	1 to 2 weeks	You, with the vendor
Reference gathering for the first batch	1 week	Your team
First models delivered for review	1 to 2 weeks after references	Vendor
Review and revision rounds	1 to 2 weeks	You
Front-end integration on the product page	1 to 3 weeks, in parallel	Your developers
Remaining models, in batches	3 to 8 weeks	Vendor
Live, measuring	ongoing	You

That adds up to six to twelve weeks from the first call to a meaningful number of products live, with the front-end work running alongside the modelling. A thousand products in a month is only possible with automated modelling, so ask to see an example of that output before signing. The usual delays on the client side are missing reference material and nobody assigned to review.

What it costs

A vendor quotes either per model or per product per month.

A one-off fee per model

You pay a fee per product for a model you own. Rates vary a lot with complexity, from a rigid box to a configurable upholstered sofa. After delivery the files are yours, and so is the hosting.

A monthly fee per product

A subscription covering modelling, hosting, format conversion, the viewer and updates. Our own pricing works this way. Basic is $10 per product per month on a 12-month term with a minimum of 100 variants. Value is $20 per model per month on a 24-month term. Enterprise is quoted.

A subscription usually works out better when your catalogue changes often, because models need maintaining and re-exporting as formats change. A one-off fee suits a stable range and a team with its own 3D staff.

Whichever you pick, add the internal cost of review time, developer time and analytics. Review time, developer time and analytics are the items most often missing from the budget, and review time is the one that most often delays a project.

What results to expect

Shopify has published a Rebecca Minkoff result of a 65 percent purchase lift on AR-enabled product pages. Rebecca Minkoff chose which products to model and improved those pages at the same time, so the figure tells you the effect exists; its size on your site has to be measured there, by comparing conversion for sessions that interacted with the model against sessions that didn't.

Be conservative about returns. AR reduces one part of them, the returns that happen because the product is the wrong size for the space. Returns for colour, quality or late delivery are unchanged.

Questions to put to a vendor

A live model in your category

Ask for a link to a model of a product like yours that you can open on your own phone now. A video or a render shows less than a model you can open yourself. If they have nothing live in your category, ask how they will handle the materials and shapes specific to it.

File sizes

Ask what file size and triangle count their delivered models land at. Google's Scene Viewer documentation gives a model size of 10 MB, textures at 2048 by 2048 or below, and a recommended limit of 100,000 triangles with 30,000 to 50,000 as the ideal range. Shopify puts the ideal GLB at around 4 MB.

Ownership of the models

Ask what happens to your files if you leave, and get it in the contract.

Format conversion and hosting

GLB and USDZ both keep changing, and someone has to keep your files up to date. Ask who does that and whether it's included.

Revision rounds

Ask how many are included, what counts as a revision, and what an extra round costs.

The list of what they need from you

Ask for the list of reference material they need per product before the project starts; gathering it is your team's biggest job in the first weeks.

What their models cannot do

Every pipeline has limits. Ask which products in your range fall outside theirs and what happens to those.

Where to start

Start with a short list of large, expensive products that are hard to judge from photos. Put them on live product pages with proper analytics, compare them against the rest of the catalogue for a month or two, and then decide whether to extend. Contura's wood-burning stoves are one example: a stove is heavy to return and its clearance from the walls is hard to judge from a photo.

A pilot doesn't need a purchase order to start, because the first model is free: send us one product. The full service is described on solutions and the fees are on prices.