Snap is investing in new features around augmented reality lenses to help brands better drive sales.  

During its annual Partner Summit, Snap detailed new efforts around its camera technology, allowing brands to upload products for users to try on virtually and purchase. This will allow shoppers to take full-body images to see whole outfits, rather than just a bag or a hat.

Snap is expanding its AR shopping tools so brands and retailers can easily upload their products for AR try-on. Snap’s new AR image processing feature will be a big player here, allowing retailers to use existing product photos to create AR-renderings for try-on. Snapchat users can try on outfits by taking a full-body selfie. 

“Take a Snap and share with friends to get their opinion,” said Carolina Arguelles Navas, Snap’s global product marketing lead, during the event. “Ultimately going from this looks good, to this looks good on me.”

Since January of last year, more than 250 million Snapchat users have used AR shopping lenses more than 5 million times to virtually try on products, according to the company. 

Snap is also adding an in-app shopping tab, called “Dress Up,” where users will be able to browse try-on and shopping lenses in one place and make purchases, similar to the Shop tab on Instagram.

Social platforms have been eager to become shopping destinations in a bid to be more attractive to advertisers. 

Brands can also use new 3D asset manager and AR shopping templates to make AR shopping ads. Retailers can also request to use Snap’s camera kit to bring AR try on to a brand’s native apps. Puma will be one of the first to try out the tech to let shoppers try on sneakers before purchase.

For lens creators, that off-Snap camera expansion has the potential to be a way to partner with brands. 

“One of Snapchat's main pushes is AR and how partners can use the technology in their apps,” said Cyrene Q, a Snap lens creator. “This in turn opens a lot of job opportunities for lens creators.” If more retailers integrate Snap’s camera on their apps, that can lead to more demand for lens creators.

But video creators would rather see Snap rethink its creator fund. In order to compete with TikTok, Snap was paying out $1 million per day to creators for popular videos. In June 2021, the company changed this to millions of dollars per month instead. 

Caren Babaknia, a content creator who posts on Snapchat, Reels and TikTok, said he noticed the change in payments and that videos that were getting millions of views were being passed over by Snap. “It’s harder to grow on Snapchat, but the pay is usually better,” he said. “TikTok is the opposite—you get more followers, but lower pay.”

Babaknia says he hopes Snap will go back to a million dollars a day. “Even if it was $500,000 a day, I think that would be worth it for creators to come back.”

Other creators, like Mia Finney, reached an audience of over 40 million Snapchatters on Spotlight in just three months, generating six figures from Snapchat last year, according to the company. 

The Summit comes on the heels of Snap reporting a solid first quarter, with a user base of 332 million daily active users and over $1 billion in ad revenue. Like many of the other social media platforms, Snap is still dealing with the Apple iOS privacy changes, forcing it to prove to advertisers that the app can keep the attention, and purchase power, of its users. Snap has a couple of routes to do this: licensing its camera kit for retailer use, virtual try-on lenses that help consumers decide to buy, and lens creators partnering with brands to drive awareness.

On the video creator side, Snap is bulking up its editing tools within the app in Director Mode, including a dual-camera feature that will let users film using the front and back-facing camera at the same time. 

Snap is also introducing new hardware—Pixy, a small, remoteless flying drone that stays a few feet above the user to capture photos and videos, which are saved to Snapchat. The new gizmo could be another way for creators to make content.

Pixy is available, while supplies last, in the U.S. and France at Pixy.com. The base flight pack costs $229.99.