Shopping in virtual reality: A literature review and future agenda

Virtual reality (VR) refers to technologies for substituting the perceived reality. With the recent proliferation of consumer-grade head-mounted VR displays, several industries have started to wake up to the possible potential of virtual reality. One typical area in the early stages of the adoption of these technologies is marketing, and especially its sub-areas of retail and shopping. However, there has been a dearth in our understanding of how VR technology has been investigated in retail-related literature. This study systematically reviewed a body of 72 research papers that investigated the application of VR in shopping. The corpus was reviewed for covered research methods, theories, investigated output and input devices, tracking technologies, products and simulated environments, antecedents and consequences. Based on experiment-based studies in the corpus, we assessed the effects of VR and related stimuli on consumer psychology and behavior in the context of shopping. Based on the review, we propose 16 future research avenues pertaining to concepts, themes, methodologies and technologies.