What’s on the mind of many B2C brands? To increase sales and profitability. From engaging customers to upscaling, the strategies to get there vary.
Providing shoppers with custom online products can be a great addition to maximizing sales and fully grasping the potential of your products.
Why? How? Don’t leave, we’ll go through it step by step.
Custom online products: what’s the benefit?
The benefits of getting product customization right are never-ending—the reason why is simple.
You provide a product. That product is created with a persona in mind, however, every person is unique, and although the solution you provide resonates with them, it’s not tailor-made, it’s not specific to their needs and desires.
This results in buyers struggling to find the best product that targets their requirements and potentially engaging with other brands other than yours.
Custom online products engage and empower the customer in their buying journey. Puts the creation wand in their hand. The significant benefits are, amongst others:
- Higher product page engagement
- Better customer experience
- Increased customer loyalty
- Fewer returns
- Competitive advantage
Engaging and focusing on your customers while channeling the full potential of your solution is what custom online products are all about.
Custom online products inevitably are meant to increase profit, but what is the right way to do it?
How can you provide customization on your website without completely changing it? How can you enable customization no matter how many product variations you’d like to provide? How can you fit it into your business strategy? Stay tuned.
3D configuration as a customization tool
A 3D configurator creates virtual 3D models of your products, enabling you to have visually rich interactive solutions that can be added to your online store.
3D configuration fuels customization. How? With a configurator, you can choose what attributes you want shoppers to be able to customize. For example, when customizing a car, it could include modifying its color, upgrading the wheels, or adding internal features such as an upgraded stereo or touchscreen.
This element of creation and product interactions elevates the entire customer experience. The product is no longer a static image but a detailed construction that the customer can inspect from every angle. Using a phone, tablet, or computer, they can zoom in or out, examining a 360° image of a product before it’s ever produced.
Buyers are empowered in their journey by being able to “feel” for the textures, details, and quality. The sensorial journey can be upgraded when 3D configuration is combined with Augmented Reality, but that’s a different story.
Or is it? Expivi’s 3D configuration platform has AR capabilities, which means that besides creating their own design of your products, the shoppers can also place it in their desired context. A sofa in their living room, a table in their dining room…
Expivi’s 3D configurator for custom online products
3D configurators can be comprehensive to integrate and require a lot of work to maintain. Let’s say you want to add a few color options to a specific product you sell, or even textures. With a built-in 3D configurator, it takes time and a qualified workforce to change the code behind it.
Using Expivi, once you have the 3D configurator integrated onto your website, it’s easy to update and even upscale it. It’s a no-code configurator that works using a configuration flow (hierarchy system). It requires one or two days of training to fully learn how to use it, but once your team knows the essentials, everything becomes easy.
To have a fully working configurator and custom online products with Expivi, you need to undergo three main phases:
1- Preparation
First things first. You need to have an eCommerce website and 3D models of your products. If you don’t have those models, Expivi’s talented 3D artists can create them for you. After that, you need to create an Expivi account at www.expivi.net.
2- Configuration
The second major step is to create attributes. To do so, you’ll have to ask yourself:
- Do I know how many variations my product needs to have? How many colors, textures, and shapes?
- What parts of your product do I want to configure? Do I want to make everything customizable or just certain things?
- What options and variations is your market looking for?
- What are my competitors missing out on?
Depending on the nature of your product you might want to provide color options, different sizes, and/or accessories. This is what is known as the configuration flow. Think about the options you want to provide your customers and in what order. Our team will be with you every step of the way to make sure the process goes smoothly.
3- Integration
The final step is to integrate the configurator onto the website. Depending on which eCommerce platform you use (Shopify, SAP, WooCommerce…) it may vary, but our team can also help you with this and see what’s the best fit. Always good to remember that it is a no-code configurator, so you don’t need a team of developers to maintain or update it.
Custom online products require a lot from a lot of people, from product designers to manufacturers it’s difficult to get it right. The question is what if you could have all of the involved links connected through one single platform? Maybe it would be easier.
Reach out to us if you think we can be a part of each other’s futures.
Did you like this article on custom online products? Then read more about its benefits right here.