ARQR360 vs 8th Wall: What a Footwear Store Actually Gets from Each

Picture a shoe store owner in Austin. She sells sneakers and boots online and from one shop. Her customers love the range. Her returns pile up anyway, because shoes are the hardest thing to buy sight unseen. She hears about AR try-on: point the phone at your foot, see the shoe on it. Then she finds two names and gets confused. 8th Wall and ARQR360. Both do AR. They are not the same thing at all. Here is the honest version.

What 8th Wall is

8th Wall is a WebAR development platform. That means developers use it to build AR experiences that run in the phone browser, with no app for the shopper to install. It was acquired by Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go, in March 2022. Big brands have used it for sneaker launches and try-on campaigns built by their agencies.

The key word is developers. 8th Wall is a toolkit, not a product you switch on. Your store does not buy AR from 8th Wall. A developer builds AR for your store with 8th Wall. And in 2026 the ground shifted: Niantic open-sourced the engine and shut down the hosted services, including the cloud editor and user logins. The code is free. The building, hosting, and maintenance are on you or the agency you hire.

What 8th Wall costs a shoe store now

The engine itself now costs nothing to download, since it is open source. That sounds cheap until you price the rest. Someone has to design the try-on experience, build every shoe as a true-to-size 3D model, write the code, host it, and keep it working when phone browsers update. For context, before the open-source move, press reports put commercial brand licenses around $3,000 a month per project. The license went away. The developer bill did not.

The honest math: 8th Wall is free the way a free kitchen is free. You still pay the chef. A store with 40 styles in three colors needs over a hundred 3D models plus a build project, before a single customer tries a shoe on.

What ARQR360 is

ARQR360 is a done-for-you AR (Augmented Reality) service for independent retailers. You send photos of your bestselling shoes and their real listed sizes. We build the true-to-size AR (Augmented Reality) views and hand you links and QR codes that open try-on in your customer's phone browser. No app. No developer. No 3D team on your side. About seven days from photos to a live catalogue.

The price is flat and public: $249 one-time setup and $29 a month. The AR (Augmented Reality) views are included. No product cap, no per-view fee, no agency invoice sitting on top.

Setup effort: a build project vs sending photos

An 8th Wall project starts with a brief to a developer or agency: what the try-on should do, which shoes, which pages, who hosts it. Then the 3D models get built one by one. Then the code. Then testing on real phones. Then you maintain it. That is the right shape for a brand with a digital team. It is a heavy shape for a shop with five staff and a Shopify store.

With ARQR360 the project is: send photos, get working try-on links back in about seven days. The links go on your product pages. The QR codes go on the shelf tags. There is nothing to integrate and nothing to maintain.

True-to-size accuracy

Both routes show the shoe at real size on the customer's foot. Accuracy lives in the 3D model, not the viewer. A model built from the real shoe places correctly. A model that guessed will look close but sit wrong, and customers notice wrong.

With 8th Wall, the accuracy of your try-on is the accuracy of the models your developer builds or buys. With ARQR360, we build the AR (Augmented Reality) views from your photos and real dimensions, and the free test model exists so you can check the shoe against the real pair on your own foot before you pay for anything.

One more number, and it is Shopify's own data, not ours: products with 3D or AR views convert about 94% better than products without. Whichever route you take, giving shoppers a true-to-size try-on beats a flat photo.

Who each one fits

8th Wall makes sense if:

• You are a footwear brand with a digital team or an agency on retainer
• You want a custom try-on experience nobody else has, not just standard AR
• You already have true-to-size 3D models of your range, or a budget to build them
• You can host and maintain a web project for years

ARQR360 is designed for stores like yours if:

• You are an independent shoe retailer or a small chain
• You sell finished shoes and hold no 3D files
• You use Shopify, WooCommerce, or a simple website
• You want customers to try shoes on their own feet, live in their own room, fast
• You need one public price with no surprises

The question to ask both routes

Before you sign anything, get the same four answers in writing: what is the full annual cost including every 3D model, who builds the models and from what source material, who maintains the experience when browsers change, and does the customer need to download an app. The answers will tell you which route fits your store faster than any feature list.

For another footwear comparison, read ARQR360 vs Seek for footwear stores.

The cheapest way to check if AR works for your store

You do not have to commit to anything to find out. Send a photo of your bestselling shoe and we will build you one true-to-size AR (Augmented Reality) view free. Put it on your own foot, check it against the real shoe, and see if your customers would use it. If it does not convince you, you have spent nothing. Try the live footwear demo first: it opens in your phone browser, no install.

Engines and frameworks aside, shoppers return shoes for one reason above all: the size was a guess. Augmented reality for shoe stores explains what a true-size view does to that guess.