A sofa rendered ten percent too small is worse than no AR at all. Keep that in mind, because everything else follows from it.
Furniture was AR's first killer use case and it is still the strongest, because the pitch is the purchase anxiety itself: see the actual sofa, at actual size, in your actual room, before spending actual money.
The brands doing it well obsess over two things, and neither is glamorous. True scale, because a wrong-size render destroys trust instantly. And dead-simple use, because the shopper standing in a living room holding a phone will not troubleshoot. Point, place, decide. Anything fancier loses.
IKEA's app gets named in every article on this topic, and it earned it. It proved the concept at massive scale years before anyone else. But the more interesting story now is the mid-size furniture brands shipping solid AR without a press release. The cost curve collapsed. What needed a custom app and an agency five years ago is now a plugin and a 3D model on an augmented reality product page. One tap, camera opens, sofa appears. Mid-size brands do not need IKEA's budget anymore. They need IKEA's discipline about accuracy. A smaller brand that nails true-to-scale placement will beat a giant with sloppy AR every time. Shoppers reward accuracy, not logos.
What the published numbers tend to show: longer engagement, better conversion on considered purchases, and fewer it-looked-bigger-online returns. Furniture carries the highest purchase anxiety in ecommerce, so it has the most anxiety for AR to remove.
ARCommerce tracks furniture brands using AR with their published results, part of 68 brands across 12 industries.
Selling furniture online? I consult e-commerce brands on adding AR, from 3D assets to product pages, at arcommerce.fyi.