Demystifying Augmented Reality (AR) in Marketing From the E-Commerce Perspective

Augmented reality (AR) technology has been widely used in various business applications in the past five years. Since the beginning of 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on various industries, AR has become one of the technologies that have significantly reduced physical interactions between buyers and sellers. This chapter reflects its finding in fours areas: 1) eCommerce mobile AR apps can allow customers to better interact with products virtually. 2) AR facilitates customer shopping journey in three stages of purchasing, namely before-purchase, purchase, and after-purchase stages. 3) Design and develop mobile AR apps with two features of virtuality and interactivity to the extent that enables customers to favor AR apps to the offline shopping experience in a sustainable trend. 4) Online retailers can utilize their AR apps to predict target customers' preferences, hence giving them effective promotions to motivate them to buy their preferred products online.