The winners are boring. I mean that as a compliment, because the best AR in ecommerce is the kind you barely notice.
Furniture brands win by answering one question: will it fit. Drop a true-to-scale sofa in your living room, and the biggest purchase anxiety in home goods just evaporates. Beauty brands win on a different question: which shade is actually mine. Foundation shopping was a guessing game for a decade; virtual try-on turned it into a mirror. Eyewear brands win on fit, because flat photos tell you nothing about how glasses sit on a real face.
See the pattern? Each of them picked the single problem AR actually solves for their product and ignored the rest. The brands that flop do the opposite. They treat AR like a feature checklist, bury it three taps deep in the app, and then act surprised when nobody taps it twice. Placement is half the battle. If a shopper cannot find it in two seconds, it does not exist.
What I keep noticing: the technology is rarely the reason a rollout fails. The models are decent, the viewers work. What fails is the boring stuff. Wrong scale, hidden button, no measurement. Fix those and mediocre tech outperforms fancy tech. Shoppers reward accuracy and ease, not engineering ambition.
ARCommerce tracks 68 brands using AR and 3D on product pages, with the use cases and the conversion numbers each brand actually published. The failures are in there too, which matters more than it sounds. A brand that launched AR as a novelty and starved it of placement teaches you as much as a winner.
Thinking about AR for your own store? I consult e-commerce brands on adding AR, from 3D assets to product pages, at arcommerce.fyi.