Virtual Fitting Rooms That Sell: Study Reveals Which AR Features Actually Drive Fashion Shoppers to Buy

Augmented reality has quietly become one of the most talked-about tools in fashion retail, promising shoppers the ability to try on clothing, experiment with styles, and visualise products without ever stepping into a fitting room. Yet for all the industry enthusiasm, a fundamental question has remained surprisingly difficult to answer: which specific features of an AR experience actually make customers feel they are creating value alongside a brand, and does that feeling translate into real purchasing behaviour? A new study from researchers at NUST Business School in Islamabad, published in the journal Discover Sustainability, offers one of the first attribute-level answers from an emerging market, and its findings cut against some common assumptions about what makes AR shopping experiences work.

The research team, led by Sana Imran with colleagues Farasat Ali Shah Bukhari, Fizza Khalid, Muhammad Saqib Iqbal, and Hassan Waqar Raja, focused on Pakistan’s fashion retail sector, a rapidly digitising market where clothing brands have begun deploying AR applications to engage consumers. Rather than treating augmented reality as a single undifferentiated technology, the researchers broke the AR experience down into six distinct attributes: immersion, aesthetic appeal, creative thinking, telepresence, connectedness, and commercial personalisation. Each of these captures a different psychological dimension of what happens when a shopper interacts with a virtual try-on tool, from the sensation of being absorbed in the experience to the feeling that a brand genuinely understands one’s personal style.

The theoretical backbone of the study is value co-creation, a concept drawn from service-dominant logic in marketing theory. In this framework, customers are no longer passive recipients of products and services but active collaborators who contribute to the brand experience itself. When a shopper uses an AR feature to experiment with outfits, provide implicit feedback through their choices, or engage with brand content, they are arguably co-creating value with the company. The researchers hypothesised that specific AR attributes would strengthen this sense of co-creation, which would in turn boost behavioural intentions such as continued app use and recommendation, and ultimately drive purchase intention. This three-stage chain, from AR attribute to value co-creation to behavioural intention to purchase, formed the model they set out to test.

To gather evidence, the team surveyed 216 consumers who had used AR features from a Pakistani clothing brand within the previous six months, a screening criterion designed to ensure that every respondent was drawing on genuine first-hand experience rather than speculation. The survey instrument measured each construct with adapted items; for example, immersion was assessed through statements about feeling completely absorbed and losing track of time, while commercial personalisation was captured through statements about product suggestions being tailored to individual preferences. The data were then analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling, a statistical technique widely used in business research because it can estimate complex networks of relationships between latent psychological constructs that cannot be observed directly.

The results delivered a clear split among the six AR attributes. Four of them, commercial personalisation, connectedness, creative thinking, and immersion, were positively associated with value co-creation, meaning that shoppers who experienced personalised suggestions, emotional connection with the brand, opportunities for creative experimentation, and deep absorption reported a stronger sense of partnership with the brand. Strikingly, however, two attributes failed to reach statistical significance: aesthetic appeal and telepresence. In other words, a visually polished interface and the sensation of being virtually present with the product did not, on their own, make shoppers feel they were co-creating value. For an industry that has invested heavily in graphical fidelity and realistic rendering, this is a provocative result.

The downstream chain of the model held together as predicted. Value co-creation was positively associated with behavioural intention, encompassing intentions to reuse AR features, recommend the experience to others, and engage more deeply with the brand. Behavioural intention, in turn, was positively associated with purchase intention, including the likelihood of buying products tried on virtually and confidence in purchasing after an AR experience. The researchers also examined indirect effects and found that commercial personalisation, creative thinking, and immersion were associated with purchase intention through the theoretically proposed sequence involving value co-creation and behavioural intention. This suggests that these three attributes work on purchasing behaviour not directly but by first making customers feel like collaborators in the brand experience, which then builds engagement that culminates in buying.

The practical implications for fashion retailers, particularly in emerging markets, are substantial. If personalisation, creative engagement, relational connection, and immersion are the attributes that matter, then AR development priorities may need to shift. A beautifully rendered but generic virtual mirror may impress shoppers without changing their behaviour, whereas a simpler tool that recommends styles matched to individual preferences, encourages playful experimentation with combinations, and reinforces brand values could deliver measurable commercial returns. The finding on connectedness is especially interesting for markets like Pakistan, where brand communities and social identity around clothing are strong; AR experiences that make shoppers feel part of a larger community or cause appear to deepen the co-creation dynamic that ultimately drives sales.

The authors are careful to flag important limitations, and these deserve equal attention. The study used a cross-sectional design, capturing attitudes at a single point in time, which means it identifies statistical associations rather than definitive causal relationships. It remains possible, for instance, that shoppers already inclined to buy also rate AR features more favourably, rather than the features causing the purchase intent. Additionally, the authors note that discriminant validity was not demonstrated for all construct pairs, a statistical caveat indicating that some of the measured constructs may overlap conceptually more than the model assumes. The sample of 216 consumers, while adequate for the modelling technique used, is modest, and the findings are explicitly described as preliminary attribute-level evidence rather than settled conclusions.

There are also broader contextual questions the study opens but does not resolve. Pakistan’s fashion retail sector differs from Western markets in cultural norms, technology infrastructure, and consumer expectations, and it is an open question whether the same attribute hierarchy would emerge in Europe, North America, or East Asia. The screening window of six months of AR use means the sample reflects relatively recent adopters, who may respond differently from the general shopping population. Future research with longitudinal designs, larger and more diverse samples, and perhaps experimental manipulation of individual AR attributes would be needed to confirm which features cause value co-creation and to test whether the aesthetic appeal and telepresence null results hold up under different conditions.

Nevertheless, the study marks a meaningful step forward in understanding how augmented reality actually functions as a marketing instrument rather than a novelty. By decomposing the AR experience into testable psychological attributes and tracing a pathway from those attributes through value co-creation and behavioural intention to purchase, the researchers have given both scholars and practitioners a framework for evaluating AR investments with more precision than blanket enthusiasm allows. For fashion brands in emerging markets contemplating their next digital initiative, the message is nuanced: the technology’s commercial power appears to lie not in how realistic or beautiful the virtual experience looks, but in how personally relevant, creatively engaging, relationally meaningful, and immersive it feels to the shopper who uses it.

Subject of Research: The association between augmented reality experience attributes and value co-creation in fashion retail

Article Title: Augmented reality attributes and value co-creation in Pakistan's fashion retail sector

Article References: Augmented reality attributes and value co-creation in Pakistan's fashion retail sector. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04683-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04683-8

Keywords: augmented reality, value co-creation, fashion retail, consumer behavior, Pakistan, emerging markets, behavioral intention, purchase intention, structural equation modelling, service-dominant logic, telepresence, personalisation