Lots of evidence suggests you are incorrect about a few things, Blisters sales across the industry are not good, fewer products than ever are sold in blisters, as a proportion of SKU's. Products with better packaging sell far better. And QR codes, we have them on some of our products, and we track the use. No one uses them.
I'm not surprised no one uses QR codes. But I think it really is because of what I'm going to next, no one uses them because they know what they're getting before they even get to the box. The important bit was really having a very good web presentation of the contents of the box. That was is on the box itself is mostly irrelevant.
For blister sales, I guess it would beg the question, are sales not good because they are in blisters or because what companies put in blisters are things people aren't going to buy. If I'm picking up something I don't know and the only thing that is going to sell me on that product in my hand is the product itself right then right in my hand, then being able to see the model is more important than seeing some pictures.
What most companies put in blisters are individual, and usually much more expensive, models. I never bought GW blisters, not because they were blisters, but because the price per model was about 3x the already high cost of their models in other boxes. I could make a pretty good "special character X" from much cheaper bits from other kits in most cases. Or they did have rank and file types in blisters, but they were also really expensive and no where near the count needed to actually use said pack. If my choice is buy a blister of one thing or buy the same thing in a bigger box for cheaper, of course I'm going to do the bigger box. Which of course was the situation with most of Spartan's blisters. All of my Battletech models came in blisters and that was just great for me. In that game one model was just as valuable on its own as with others, so having to buy a box with multiple models, several of which I don't want or need, didn't make any sense.
But it all comes down to the fact that I don't think anyone impulsively buys anything based on the box in the store. Unless of course that box is deeply discounted, which is not really what we're trying to look at. I've *never* impulsively bought a box at a store because of the box, I have impulsively bought something that I knew I wanted and already knew about, the time of the purchase was impulse, but not the content. I've seen some interesting looking models and found out more about the system, but that is much more often seeing someone playing with the models or them on display and not because of a box.
It is a great strategy for a toy isle, I've seen it work really well on kids. Of course even then, with toys, with the most impulsive group of all, very young children, they always *always* show the toy itself. They have the toy front and center with the box accenting the actual item.
Any focus on shelf presence just seems like you're trying to be Sears and K-Mart in the age of Amazon...