ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
In the digital marketing era, Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a transformative technology that enhances consumers’ experience and engagement. This article aims to provide a narrative review of AR’s evolution, distinguishing it from Virtual Reality (VR), key AR features that influence the consumer’s behaviour in the retail industry, highlighting its benefits in marketing, and discussing AR Marketing paradigms and different types of mobile augmented reality apps. Articles from peer-reviewed journals were analyzed to provide insight into AR’s role. The findings show that AR features discussed in the literature are reality congruence, aesthetics, personalized experience, system quality, novelty, interactivity, vividness, informativeness, and augmentation. The benefits of AR in retail are that it helps improve users’ understanding and predicts the product's performance; it saves time and effort when shopping and improves decision-making skills. AR apps can increase conversion rates, reduce return rates of products and online cart abandonment, and reinvigorate stagnant physical inventories.
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