The shopping funnel is over.

The traditional shopping funnel was a tidy thing. A buyer noticed a product, considered it for a few days, intended to buy, then bought. Brands had time to advertise at each stage. The funnel could be modelled, measured, optimised.

That funnel no longer exists.

A recent Deloitte and Google report, The $250 Billion Commerce Frontier, shows that Gen Z has collapsed the multi-day buyer journey into a multi-second one. For Gen Z, the gap between noticing a product and buying it has all but disappeared. A generation raised entirely inside digital commerce is rewriting the rules of retail. By 2030, Gen Z is projected to account for roughly 45% of all e-commerce spend.

For brands, this is not a marketing problem. It is a commerce architecture problem. The pipeline is dead. In its place, the report describes “an always-on loop of simultaneous discovery and validation.”

The four forces shaping what comes next

The Deloitte and Google research identifies four forces holding the new loop together. Each collapses a stage of the old funnel:

• Inspired commerce. Discovery starts inside creator-led ecosystems. Digital creators directly influence one in three retail purchases.
• Immersive commerce. 3D models, AR, VR, and interactive viewers eliminate the physical-evaluation barrier that used to stall consumers at consideration.
• Instant commerce. Quick-fulfilment platforms compress hours into minutes, closing the transaction loop before the shopper can hesitate.
• Intelligent commerce. Agentic systems guide shoppers through choices, comparisons, and checkout in a single conversation.

Together, these four forces are projected to contribute roughly $100 billion to commerce growth by 2030.

Where 3D fits

Of the four pillars, immersive commerce is the one that most directly addresses what fashion brands have struggled with for the entire history of online retail. The shopper has always been forced to imagine fit, drape, weight, finish, and texture from a handful of photographs.

The report is direct about what 3D enables here. In its breakdown of immersive commerce capabilities, 3D/AR product visualisation is listed as the canonical online interface lever, the primary technology that lets brands close, in the report’s own phrase, the “imagination gap” of online shopping.

The research describes the broader effect of immersive tools:

“These immersive digital tools not only drive a 20% incremental revenue boost for adaptive brands but also provide immediate cognitive validation, allowing the shopper to transition from curiosity to transactional execution in seconds.”

Deloitte & Google, The $250 Billion Commerce Frontier, 2026

When a shopper can rotate, zoom, and inspect the actual product before they buy, the imagination gap closes. They commit more often, and they return less of what arrives, because what arrives matches what they explored. Two numbers move on the same change. Conversion rises. Returns fall.

Asset production costs drop alongside them. One 3D Twin becomes every campaign visual that follows. The same Twin that lives on the product page also produces the next ad, the next email, the next lookbook.

Fashion is the showcase category

The Deloitte and Google data is unambiguous about why fashion sits at the centre of this shift. 32% of shoppers say they want to touch, feel, and try the product before buying, and apparel is named as one of the categories that friction hits hardest. The gap between a photograph and the parcel that arrives is one of the structural drivers of returns in fashion: shoppers consistently report that what shows up looks different from what they thought they ordered.

Interactive 3D closes that gap directly. Replacing a static photograph with a rotating, zoomable 3D model lets a shopper see drape, weight, scale, and finish in a way no flat image can. Most fashion brands today still show only photography, leaving the imagination gap wide open. The report’s framework names 3D/AR product visualisation as the canonical online interface lever for immersive commerce, and the adjacent categories are already showing the precedent.

Asian Paints, for example, uses 3D visualisation in its AR-powered Colour Visualizer to let homeowners preview paint colours, wallpapers, and finishes before they buy. The same logic applies more strongly to apparel. Fashion’s version of that is the 3D Twin: photorealistic, interactive, and persistent across every surface where the shopper might encounter the product.

One Twin, every surface

This is what the Deloitte and Google report calls an integrated, always-on commerce engine. Marketing, product page, and content production stop being separate corporate silos and start being three uses of the same underlying asset.

The same research finds that 89% of shoppers want a fluid journey across phone, browser, and physical store. The 3D Twin is the only asset that can travel through every one of those surfaces and behave consistently. The model on your product page is the same model in your ad creative, the same model in your email, the same model on a tablet at retail. The report even projects 3D into the in-store experience itself, with shelf tags that display product details in 3D so a customer can order an out-of-stock item directly from where they’re standing.

It is also worth noting where Marvify fits within the broader immersive landscape. The report’s frame for immersive commerce spans interactive 3D viewers, AR, VR, virtual try-on tools, and live shopping. Marvify’s focus is the foundational layer: the photorealistic 3D model itself. Whether the brand uses it as an embedded viewer on a product page, as the source for ad and campaign assets, or as the underlying model that future try-on or AR experiences plug into, the Twin is the asset everything else is built on.

Marvify exists to build that asset. We make photorealistic 3D Twins of each of your products in our Stockholm studio. The 3D Twin lives on your site in two lines of code. From there, it powers every adjacent surface: advertising, the product page, the media library that fuels every campaign that follows.

What this means for brands

The brands that thrive in the $250 billion commerce decade ahead will be the ones that stop guiding shoppers down a structured funnel and start meeting them inside the loop. That means treating 3D as commerce infrastructure, not as a creative nice-to-have.

According to the research, virtually nothing about this is hypothetical. The technology is mature. The consumer preference is documented. The revenue lift is quantified. The market gap is wide open. One model, three uses, one decade.

The funnel is gone. The 3D Twin is what fills the space it left behind.

Sources

• Deloitte and Google, The $250 Billion Commerce Frontier, 2026. The report’s own framework names “3D/AR product visualisation” as the canonical online lever for immersive commerce. Source of the four-pillar framework, the 20% incremental revenue claim, the 89% unified-journey expectation, the $100 billion four-pillars contribution, the “imagination gap” framing, the Asian Paints reference, and the in-store 3D shelf-tag projection.
• Future of Commerce, Google & Kantar Consumer Survey, 2025. The consumer survey underlying the Deloitte and Google report. Source of the 32% touch-feel-try friction figure.
• Deloitte press release announcing the report (2026).
• ET Online. “Old shopping funnel is gone: Gen Z is rewriting rules of retail.” The Economic Times, 18 May 2026.
• Storyboard18 coverage of the Google-Deloitte report (2026).