Product Configurator Deep Dive – Blinds.com

Video: Product Configurator Deep Dive – Blinds.com

If you’re interested in adding a product configurator on your store or want to improve the experience of your current one, you’ll learn a lot from this deep dive on Blinds.com. We’ll walkthrough their product configurator and what you can takeaway for your own.

You’ll learn:

• How Blinds.com walks customers through building a product
• Why their product configurator stands out
• What you should do in your own tool

Transcript

In today’s video, we are going to do a deep dive into Blinds.com and their product configurator.

On our blog, we have a few articles and videos on product configurators and these are often some of the most popular pieces of content that we put out. A lot of people building ecommerce stores are often looking into product configurators, especially those with quite complex products, like blinds. We’re going to walk through how Blinds.com set up their product configurator, why their configurator really stands out and why we’re doing a walkthrough of them and examples of things you should keep in mind if you plan to build a configurator in the future.

Background

Just a little bit about Blinds.com, they started in 2004, and in 2014, they were acquired by Home Depot, which makes sense. They’ve experimented with a lot of different tech options, including an AR app, which does not appear to be in the app store anymore.

Anticipate Customer Questions

Walking through their product configurator, if you go on their website, each of the different product types has its own configurator, they really thought through the different features and options and questions that customers are going to have about each of these different products, they don’t have just a one size fits all configurator.

One of the really important features in a product configurator to remember is to anticipate customer questions. As somebody is going through this, somebody who does not have knowledge about blinds, perhaps they’re buying it for the first time, they just bought a new home and there are no blinds. This is somebody who needs handholding through the process, they would likely need somebody at Home Depot or Lowe’s to walk them through each of the features, but you can’t do that on the website so you need to make sure to have tool tips like this one in yellow that tries to call out an important feature for this particular outside mount option.

Explain Industry Terms

You also want to make sure to explain any industry terms. Sometimes working in a certain industry, you know what a bullnose Z frame is or a belair Z frame is, but somebody who has never purchased blinds before has no idea what these terms mean. Blinds.com does a good job of using both illustrations that are detailed and you can tell the difference between the different options as well as text to explain the options so they have a visual and a text reference to help customers decide on the frame style and mount that works best for them.

Video Explainers

Another really cool thing with Blinds.com that a lot of other product configurators don’t include is they have video explanations for a lot of the different options. Here, when you’re choosing your mount, they have this little play button down on the bottom and it brings up a modal where you can watch a video that gives some more information about choosing a mount. This video talks about when to choose an inside mount blind or shade, that’s probably really helpful for somebody who isn’t sure if they want an inside mount or an inside mount.

Dynamic Pricing

Another important thing to consider is pricing. When you’re building a particular product like let’s say a car, there’s the base model and then every addition to the car adding a GPS feature or adding leather or adding a specialty paint job is going to increase the price. You want to be really transparent when you’re creating a product configurator to make sure that customers are aware that certain options will add an additional fee to the total cost. Just put that up front, otherwise at the end, they’re going to see a price and wonder how they’ve got to the price.

Illustrate Options

Helpful illustrations as mentioned before are going to be key for certain steps in a product configurator. In this example, the customer is going to have to enter the size of their window. That can be taken in a lot of different ways and it might not be as easy to understand through text as it is through an illustration. Consider that when you have different steps of your product configurator.

Design for all Devices

And as much as we spend our days working on laptops and desktops with their large screens, we have to remember that a lot of customers are likely coming to the site on their phones. As great as a product configurator could look on desktop, we have to remember that it needs to also look really good on a smaller screen on mobile. Here for Blinds.com, the way they do this is you can scroll through the different options here on the left and the image of the blinds that they’re building is sticky up in the top right corner. And if they click the arrow buttons, then they can see a larger view and they can zoom in on the product but they’ll always see that product as they’re clicking the different features and that product will update. And then there’s also a sticky bar at the bottom with Add to Cart, the running total, as well as an estimated shipping date.

Those are a few features to remember when you’re building your product configurator or if you currently have one. Definitely go through and see if you’re hitting on each of these points and where you might be able to improve the experience for your customers. If you have any product configurators you would like us to take a look at and do a deep dive on, let us know in the comments and I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.