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REVIEW article
Front. Virtual Real.
Sec. Virtual Reality in Industry
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frvir.2025.1558475
This article is part of the Research Topic A Metaverse for the Good: Design, Application and Understanding View all 17 articles
From Immersive Worlds to Virtual Showrooms: A Taxonomy of Virtual Reality Shopping Applications
Provisionally accepted- Chair of Information and Communication Management, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
The advent of virtual reality (VR) technology and the utilization of electronic commerce (ecommerce) have become prominent features of the contemporary landscape with anticipated growth in the future. Consequently, the concept of shopping in VR has been subject of extensive research, with first consumer applications being now available on the market. The objective of this paper is to create a taxonomy for VR shopping applications, with the intention of providing a framework for the categorization of applications, as well as insights into current market developments. The taxonomy is derived from the findings of a literature review, including 55 studies, and the evaluation of 13 commercial applications. A comparison of research and commercial applications reveals that while research has advanced, commercial applications are predominantly showrooms without purchase possibilities. This discrepancy offers potential avenues for future research to understand the factors influencing companies' reluctance to develop and adopt VR shopping applications.
Keywords: retail, e-commerce, shopping, Extended Reality, XR, virtual reality, VR, Metaverse
Received: 10 Jan 2025; Accepted: 01 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Elsholz, Korbel, Pham and Zarnekow. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sophia Elsholz, Chair of Information and Communication Management, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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