Kelvin Lancer
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eCommerce is on a roll. With 79% of North America now making the majority of their purchases on the internet—significantly contributing to the 85% of global consumers who do the same—eCommerce continues to skyrocket as its acceptance and adoption become more widespread. Now, experts expect the industry to earn as much as $7.5 trillion in 2025. Of course, the road to achieving that growth doesn’t come without challenges.
Website navigation, personalization—especially when it comes to fitting apparel, which is currently the most popular eCommerce category—and promotion can negatively impact sales conversions when not done right. That’s why many online retailers use emerging technologies to enhance their websites and the overall buyer’s experience. On WooCommerce, for example, we’ve noted that Linguise’s AI translation service plugin is especially popular for making websites more accessible to wider audiences. WordPress similarly offers plugins Get Genie AI to optimize SEO, improve search engine visibility, and boost website traffic to help increase sales.
Specific sectors of the eCommerce industry take it even further with mixed reality (MR). Encompassing both augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR), it can be especially useful for making online shopping experiences more immersive in more ways than one—and that’s especially apparent in eyewear eCommerce. Here are a few ways online retailers in this category are proving MR’s potential for other eCommerce industries:
Navigation
Website navigation can get confusing the more products a retailer offers. That’s especially true in eyewear, where buyers can choose from a vast range of eyeglasses and sunglasses that come in different frame shapes, sizes, materials designs, and colorways—and even different lens technologies. Though that range means there’s something for everyone, it can also make it harder for consumers to pin down the pair that’s best for their needs amid never-ending product catalogs.
That’s where MR can help. In particular, AR can help buyers make more informed purchases by improving how quickly and easily they can access product information such as feature and price comparisons across different models. These functionalities are often integrated into mobile apps, which is especially handy given that a full two-thirds of all eCommerce sales in the US are made on mobile devices.
That usefulness can be seen in Ditar’s aptly named “Show Don’t Tell” app. The platform, which specifically focuses on AR applications in eyewear, designed it to help consumers more easily peruse lens and frame options and comparisons in a virtual environment. Ditar has recently partnered with brands like Direkt Optik to bring the app to more customers, helping improve a product’s visual representation—something that’s usually found in brick-and-mortar shopping experiences rather than online ones—so they can more easily navigate a retailer’s selections to make more confident purchases. Since this AR use case can be equally useful for other products that fall under the apparel category, the app shows that other eCommerce industries can similarly leverage it to reduce returns and improve long-term sales.
Personalization
Aside from information overload, another key challenge in eCommerce is personalization. Over 70% of online shoppers want more tailored buying experiences, but product discovery platform Zoovu finds that only 16% of the product pages it analyzed met that expectation. Emerging tech can definitely help here. AI, for example, can be great for offering product recommendations based on a user’s browsing history—but these suggestions may not be personalized enough for consumer needs, especially since AI models may not be able to accurately predict buyer intent.
Eyewear eCommerce shows just how handy MR can come in handy here, especially since glasses and sunglasses are also considered accessories that are purchased based on a user’s unique style preferences. Here, online eyewear retailers go further than product recommendations by using MR to not guess what a consumer wants to buy, but help them gauge which frames and lenses will suit them best—and letting them choose from there. That’s primarily accomplished with the provision of a virtual glasses try on tool. Target Optical integrates the feature into all of its product pages by superimposing the digital twin of an eyewear model directly on a user’s face. That allows them to determine its fit and look the same way they would in-store.
The tool’s accuracy comes courtesy of visual tracking algorithms that can determine the placement of a user’s various facial features, resulting in the improved placement of the glasses on their face. From here, an MR-powered rendering engine helps digital eyewear mimic the natural color, lighting, texture, and real-world physics that their physical counterparts would exhibit, facilitating more realistic virtual try-ons that help bridge the gap between in-store and online eyewear purchases. Tailoring the buyer experience in this way can help retailers adequately meet consumer expectations and thus boost sales, not just for eyewear, but for products in other industries that need personalization—like makeup and furniture.
Promotion
Given just how quickly the eCommerce industry is growing, it’s no surprise that competition here only becomes more intense as time goes on. That makes promoting a website and driving traffic to it a key challenge moving forward. Some of the best ways online retailers market their sites today are by leveraging SEO strategies and boosting their online presence on social media. However, a lot of their competitors are doing exactly the same thing. That’s why other eCommerce companies are leveraging MR—an emerging technology with an industry that’s still in its early stages—to create marketing campaigns that stand out.
A great example of where this is happening is eyewear eCommerce. The eyewear market as a whole is already significantly saturated, with hundreds (if not thousands) of local or international brands offering glasses and sunglasses for every consumer preference possible. Online, you’ll find everything from luxury to budget-friendly and sporty to sustainable eyewear companies displaying their wares, which is why retailers need to go the extra mile if they want to gain a competitive advantage and attract more customers. That’s arguably why Sunglass Hut consistently uses MR in its marketing campaigns.
A great example of this is its partnership with Ready Player Me, a platform that offers metaverse enthusiasts tools for customizing their avatars. By scanning QR codes at select Sunglass Hut stores, users could update their avatars with sunglasses from designer brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley. These omnichannel metaverse sunglasses promotions allowed Sunglass Hut to drive more traffic to its physical locations, which is why it’s no surprise that the retailer offers similar VR initiatives for its online shoppers. Its dedicated VR store, Sunglass Hut Utopia, promotes a gamified shopping experience that involves hunting for six exclusive products in a virtual environment. The reward? The opportunity to get the physical version of those sunglasses for their very own. Aside from being an innovative way to draw attention to its brand, Sunglass Hut’s use of MR fully immerses and engages consumers in its offerings, resulting in improved traffic and sales. The versatility of this particular application serves to further highlight the technology’s benefits for other retailers working in eCommerce.
