Research

Virtual Try-On for Watches: Research & Ecommerce Impact

What one retailer found

47%

Traffic

more visits to watch listings with try-on

81%

Wishlists

more watches saved to wishlists

22%

Carts

more "add to cart" clicks than similar watches without try-on

10%

Converts

of shoppers who actually opened the try-on tool went on to add the watch to cart

Farfetch, watch category, 14-week trial, 2022–2023. Self-reported; not run as a controlled test.

What independent researchers found

Marketing professors at UMass Lowell, DePaul University, and Canisius College ran a study comparing watches shown through virtual try-on against watches shown on a normal web page. No watch brand or try-on company funded it. Four things stood out:

Shoppers were more likely to buy

On a scale of 1 to 7, buying interest averaged around 5 with virtual try-on, versus around 3 with a standard web page.

Shoppers liked the experience more

They rated the shopping experience itself more positively with virtual try-on than with a normal product page.

"That helped" led to "I want it"

Shoppers who found the tool useful for evaluating the watch felt better about the experience — and that's what predicted wanting to buy.

Realism was the key ingredient

The effect came from feeling like they were seeing the watch on themselves, not from simply having more photos to look at.

Yim, Chu & Sauer, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 2017 — full citation below. The study used college students on desktop webcams.

Why watches are a good fit for virtual try-on

Wrists vary a lot. The same case looks different on a small wrist than a large one.
Case diameter doesn't show scale. "40mm" only means something relative to the wrist it's on.
Lug-to-lug matters as much as diameter. Two watches with the same 40mm dial can overhang a wrist very differently depending on lug length — a spec most product pages don't list.
Product photos don't show real scale. A studio shot or a hand-model photo doesn't reflect the shopper's own wrist.

How WatchSizeCheck approaches this

WatchSizeCheck lets a shopper see a specific watch at its true, real-world size on a photo of their own wrist, right in their web browser — no app to download. The goal is simple: answer the one question a spec sheet can't — "how will this watch actually look on my wrist?"

See how the try-on experience works on a live product page.

Get started

Sources & references

Yim, M. Y., Chu, S.-C., & Sauer, P. L. (2017). Is Augmented Reality Technology an Effective Tool for E-Commerce? An Interactivity and Vividness Perspective. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 39, 89–103. Read the paper on ScienceDirect
Glossy. "Farfetch is making a case for luxury virtual try-on." April 24, 2023.