Why Customers Resist Augmented Reality in Retail: A Conceptual Framework for Southeast Asian Markets

Augmented reality (AR) can enrich retail journeys by allowing customers to visualise products, conduct virtual try-ons, and interact with product information within a physical or digitally mediated setting. Nevertheless, a technically impressive application may remain unused when customers perceive it as difficult, intrusive, unreliable, unnecessary, or incompatible with established shopping practices. These concerns are especially relevant to Southeast Asian retail, where rapidly developing mobile commerce coexists with differences in device access, digital confidence, regulatory environments, retail formats, and cultural shopping practices. This conceptual paper examines customer-perceived barriers to AR adoption through Innovation Resistance Theory (IRT), supplemented by trust, perceived-risk, and facilitating-condition perspectives. The synthesis distinguishes usage, value, risk, tradition, and image barriers and applies them to customer-facing AR. It proposes that interface complexity and technical friction create usage barriers; visualisation inaccuracy and uncertain diagnostic value create value and performance-risk barriers; camera, biometric, and spatial-data concerns weaken trust; device and connectivity constraints obstruct enactment; established tactile and social shopping practices strengthen tradition barriers; and gimmick-like or unreliable positioning creates image barriers. Digital literacy, AR familiarity, trust assurances, and product category are proposed as boundary conditions. The paper contributes a customer-centred framework that treats resistance as an active and theoretically meaningful response rather than the simple absence of adoption. For managers, the analysis indicates that AR success depends on reducing friction and risk, demonstrating decision value, protecting data, and integrating AR with, rather than indiscriminately replacing physical retail experiences. Because customer-level evidence from Southeast Asia remains limited and uneven, the proposed relationships are presented as testable propositions rather than empirically established regional effects. The paper therefore specifies a multi-country validation agenda that prioritises causal ordering, measurement equivalence, product-category differences, AR familiarity, and the distinction between initial adoption and continued use.

Augmented Reality, Customer Resistance, Innovation Resistance Theory, Perceived Risk

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