Benefits of Product Configurators for Ecommerce

Visitors are more likely to purchase if they have a hand in customizing or building a product on your site. Product configurators are the best way to streamline the purchase of highly customizable products (ex. cars, blinds, custom suits).

In this video we’ll let you know the upsides (and downsides) of product configurators and share some examples across different industries.

Transcript: Benefits of Product Configurators for Ecommerce

Hi there, I’m Lauren. I’m a conversion specialist here at Command C, and today we are talking about product configurators. How can you help customers create a customized product on your store? You’re going to learn the benefits of building a configurator, the potential upsides and downsides, and we’re going to show you some examples of configurators.

Some of the benefits, once somebody customizes something, there’s often a higher likelihood of purchase, they’ve put time into designing it, it feels more like their own unique product. There’s a reduced rate of returns. You often have higher margins because it’s personalized. And if you’re a B2B company, there are shorter sales cycles because customers can configure the product on your store without needing to go through your team.

Some of the downsides and potential pitfalls, building a custom configurator, depending how you go about it, costs money to develop and maintain. You also need to educate customers who might need some help going through the customizer. You need to work on optimizing and AB testing it. And you might also have an increase in support inquiries for customers who just don’t know how to use the tool, or just want somebody else to do it for them.

One of the examples, this is a clothing store, you might think a clothing you don’t really need a customizer necessarily, or a product configurator, but here what’s unique with Ridestore is that you can create an outfit. It shows all of the product categories on the side, and you can go through and see on the model, how the full outfit’s going to look. Here you can see we selected pants, glove, goggles, jacket, you can see how the full outfit pulls together. Then once somebody selects all of their items, then all you have to do is, you can add all of the items at once to the cart, you don’t have to add them separately. And then they all show up here in the cart.

For O bag, this is a bag company and they have a customizer feature. The cool thing with them is, on their category pages that mentions four different products, which ones can be customized. You see this little customize tool here, and then when you click into the products, then you get the customize button here. You can just buy a normal bag, or you can jump into the customizer and select different body, handle, inner bag, trim, and build the bag that you want.

And here on mobile, you can see how it looks, sup at the top are the different options for customization, and then as you’re adding the different items, it’ll show below the fold, what you added and how much each of those different items costs, and then the total configured price. For Dodocase. They sell typically iPad cases, cases for different devices. Here you can customize this iPad case and you can see all the different steps,  they make it very clear what you have to do and what you can customize. You can customize as much or as little as you want, and then when you select an option, it shows what you selected here on the side. And then you can see within each step, it’ll show that part of the product and it’ll dynamically change as you select different options.

And lastly, another clothing company. This is a custom suit company. If you click the customize button here, they have tons and tons of different options. You can see down here these buttons. There are multiple different steps to customizing the suit, everything from buttons to pockets to cuffs, and will show here. Once somebody selects and goes through all of the steps, then they get a nice summary overview of all of the different options that they selected, and they can easily jump back to that step and make changes.

That’s important when you’re offering a product configurator or a way to customize products, you want to have a nice summary. Visitors aren’t having to go back through each of the different steps and try to remember what exactly they selected. They just get this summary overview and they can click into that to go back to that particular step if they need to, and then they’re able to add their fully customized product to the cart.

Those are a few examples of product configurators. There are a bunch out there. We have a few articles on the site about it at commandc.com. Hopefully you got some ideas for ways to optimize your product configurator, or maybe you’re inspired to start developing and building your own. We’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.