It’s becoming a fundamental law of the internet: where people socialize, they must also shop.

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and practically every other social
network and messaging app on the planet has spent the last couple of years trying to make
every pixel of your chats and pictures into a one-click purchasing possibility.

Snap’s plans on this front are more ambitious than most. It’s trying to take the whole shopping
experience — you see a shirt you like on a stranger, figure out what it is and where to buy it, try
it on, buy it, wear it, return it because everything looks better on Ryan Reynolds than you, rinse
and repeat — and funnel it through Snap’s AR camera. Through Camera Kit, most of that tech
can also work within brands’ websites and retailer apps. And there’s always — always — a buy
button.

That’s a lot to do, but Snap’s moving quickly. The company announced on Thursday at its
annual Creator Summit that it’s expanding its AR try-on features that let users use their cameras
to virtually try on glasses and clothes, and it’s also creating an in-app hub called Dress Up that it
hopes could be something like the future of the shopping mall.

Dress Up isn’t meant to feel like just a catalog of stuff to buy, though it certainly is that. Snap
hopes it can be a little more fun and experiential than your average Amazon page. “It’s not just a
product-feed shopping tab,” Carolina Navas, Snap’s head of AR strategy and product marketing,
said in an interview. “Now, there’s a really core utilitarian use case that we’re also focused on
driving,” because obviously getting to buy things is how everybody gets paid, “but there’s also a
huge area of fashion that’s all about self-expression and asking When you open the Dress Up
hub and pick an item, you’ll be able to try it on through Snap’s AR lenses but also take a picture
of how it looks on you and share it with friends to get their thoughts. Dress Up will also have
creator content, as well as tips and ideas from brands, all changing based on what you like, how
you use the platform, and even where you’re located. And everything everywhere can be bought
in just a tap or two.

AR shopping as a concept can seem sort of hokey — how many times do you really need to AR
a couch into your living room to see if it fits? — but Snap says it’s starting to catch on. More than
250 million users have used AR shopping lenses a total of more than 5 billion times, and Snap
says its data shows those lenses convert a much higher percentage of possible buyers than a
normal ad. And Navas said the appeal goes back to the idea that shopping is more than just
purchasing. “A lot of people think about the shopping funnel as ending at the purchase,” she
said, “but that is the beginning of the customer experience for a brand or retailer who is selling a
product.” She pointed to one company, Too Faced cosmetics, that lets users scan their new
eyeshadow palette with the Snapchat camera to get a tutorial on how to use it.The big challenge
for Snap will be to grow its catalog to bring all the things people can buy into those AR
experiences. So far, that has required a lot of specialized work building three-dimensional digital
versions of everything you make, but Snap’s trying to make it easier. It announced a new
technology called Snap AR Image Processing, which is exactly what it sounds like: it uses
machine learning to take regular product photos and turn them into 3D models. The tech comes
from Forma, a virtual-try-on company Snap quietly acquired to improve its try-on experiences.
All users need to do is take a full-body selfie, and they can try on almost anything.Snap has
been working on the tech for about 18 months, Navas said, and has been testing it with a few
brands before rolling it out to more businesses this year. “The actual process to build an AR lens
has gone from an 8–12 week experience to minutes.” The tech is new but impressive, she said,
and, when combined with user-inputted information about height and weight and whether that
shirt that fit in AR actually fits in real life, can get better fast.

Snap, like every other platform trying to embrace in-app shopping, has to be careful not to let
the buying experience overrun everything else. Snapchat users might like to shop their friends
and favorite celebrities’ looks, but they’re going to like every photo they send being hidden
behind a hundred buttons telling you where to buy their eye shadow, necklace, and the plant
behind them. Navas said that’s part of the reason Snap made Dress Up its own tab, rather than
needlessly integrating the feature everywhere else.

But she’s also pretty confident people like to shop. A lot. “We’re meeting people where their
mindset isn’t just, ‘I’m coming to this tab to buy a pair of Prada sunglasses.’ It’s, ‘I’m coming
here to explore and have fun and discover products along the way.’”