A Brief On Using Product Configurators in eCommerce Business
We are living in the digital era, where customer experience plays a key role in customers’ buying decisions with an online store. Modern consumers give more importance to their emotional state while purchasing products from an online shopping site. This enforces online shop owners to offer consumers a true sense, product visualization along with product customization options.
This is where product configurators come into play. Product configurators in the eCommerce business enable store owners to tackle the growing demands and also exceed the expectation of modern buyers.
Product Configurators in eCommerce Business
Product configuration has become a huge challenge for manufacturers in recent times, now with the availability of modern technology manufacturers manage to achieve a richer shopping experience for their products among prospective consumers.
The manufacturing process keeps evolving on a daily basis; online retailers are forced to respond to the growing demands of modern consumers on product personalization. Product configurators enable online retailers to achieve a personalized user experience.
What is a product configurator & what is its role in eCommerce? This would be a million-dollar question among the owners of an eCommerce business.
Well, product Configurator is interactive software that allows consumers to engage with the product configuration process and customize their configuration process with the available options. In general, consumers would be given the to customize a product’s color, size, texture, design, image, and so.
In simple words, a product configurator is a tool that allows customers to alter the product configurations in real-time according to their mode of interest.
Do you want to discuss the essence of product configurators in eCommerce business to deliver a personalized customer experience?
Benefits of Product Configurators in eCommerce Business
The undeniable benefits offered by the product configurators to the eCommerce business make it more popular in today’s market. Here are a few lists of top benefits online stores can get because of product configurators.
Reduces Product Returns
The main objective of using product configurators is to provide absolute visualization of the product to the consumers. Once consumers start viewing the vivid pictures of the products along with accurate specific details they get more details to know about the product they purchase.
This reduces disappointments among the consumers after the product purchase, owing to that there will be a significant decrease in product returns.
Increases Customer Experience
The usage of product configurators in online stores creates more awareness about the products among the consumers. This creates an opportunity to spot the ideal products they are looking for in a quick session.
In addition, product configuration creates a fun-filled and seamless shopping experience for the consumers. Because of that, consumers get a happy shopping experience and prefer to shop again in the future.
Exceptional Management of Product Inventory
Selling customizable products doesn’t require large storage space for stocking your products and to use as an inventory. Since every product is going to be customized according to the customer’s mode of interest, there is no need for manufacturers to stock/store a large number of products.
At the same time, as a business owner, you need to make sure consumers get their customized products within the allocated time frame. Because it would be irritating for consumers if they were forced to wait for a long time to avail their customized products.
Increases Conversion Rate
Offering customized products is not something similar to selling normal products, you are about to manufacture products according to the individual customer’s mode of interest from a design perspective.
This makes the products unique and customers would love to purchase them. And without any second thoughts, they will be ready to pay more for buying those limited products. Owing to this, more potential consumers will show their interest in customizing production by using your product configurators and turn out to be reputed consumers in the future.
Configurators Acts as A Great Marketing Tool
By using product configurators, consumers can design and prefer to manufacture products according to their creative spirit. Literally, they would be like investors in creating such customized product creation for their own.
Because of that, they would love to share their configuration among their friends through social media and via other platforms. This will attract and trigger interest among more people to try their configurations using your product configurator.
Do you want to avail all the above listed benefits by considering product configurators in eCommerce business that help boost your sales and revenue?
Best Practices For Product Configurators in Ecommerce Platform
Well, so far you have read about product configurators and their role in the eCommerce business. The usage of product configurators has been around for years in the industry. However, it is the right time to make use of the configurators with the best practices to avail of its full benefits.
In this section, we will elaborate on the pinpoints of the best practices to be followed while using the product configurators in the eCommerce business.
1. Drive Your Customers Focus Towards Your Product
Shopping is an activity that entertains buyers or consumers with a lot of fun. In keeping that, you should offer an exceptional shopping experience to your consumers. Once your consumer reaches your product configurator, you should ensure that they get everything that they look for in the product configuration process.
By doing so, you are able to drive your consumer’s focus towards your products by providing all the necessary information. If you have more features for a single product, make sure you offer enough space to your buyers to learn all those features of that product. This creates more engagement between the products and the buyers.
The top eCommerce platform does this and makes sure all their consumers are insanely satisfied. The Pimcore platform offers such a flexible platform to add educational elements to your product configurators. Pimcore allows its users to carry out compatibility checks and enough space to search for getting additional information like ‘how-to’ details about the product.
By offering such a fun and educative kind of details, customers would get more satisfied and look to buy more products by visiting again. The leading gaming gear manufacturing computer hardware company Corsair gets it right by using this best practice in their product configurator.
2. Providing Customers a Seamless 360 Degree View Of the Products
As of today’s heavy competitive market condition, providing a 360-degree view of the products to consumers is considered as one of the prime and best practices to do. The implementation of the product configurator is to offer an in-store purchasing experience to the consumers who are using the eCommerce platform.
While purchasing a product in an offline store, consumers view the products from a different angle before purchasing them. The same experience has to be offered via product configurators. By doing, online shopping would reflect the in-store shopping experience.
By the way, offering such an in-store shopping experience along with real-time product features updates in an online store via omnichannel will create a strong impression and drive more potential consumers towards your online store.
The 3D configurator tool offered by Studio Shed uses this best practice and allows users to build & design their high-efficiency prefab modern sheds & backyard studios.
3. Showcasing All The Steps Involved In Product Configuration Process
Displaying all the steps involved in the product configuration process to the consumers will help your consumers to keep track of the product’s current position at any time. Apart from just tracking all the configuration processes, consumers are able to view the product configuration process at any stage by using the prolific navigation system.
The navigation features of tracking products configuration in any stage and tracking the current configuration process of the product will create a positive impact on consumers to make a positive final purchasing choice.
One of the great German-based motor vehicle manufacturers Volkswagen successfully implements this process of displaying all the 4 stages involved in the manufacturing of their motor vehicle to their consumers. Consumers can view the configuration process at any stage including the “interior” development through navigation.
Do you want to explore more about the product configurations process? We would love to help you by providing a demonstration.
4. Make Sure You Highlight All the Possible Way of Product Configuration To Customers
The main concept behind the introduction of the product configurator is to make the shopping process much simpler for the consumers. On considering that fact, while configuring your product configurator makes sure you simplified all those complex processes involved in the shopping at your store. Product configuration should be made upon the customers’ perceptions and by considering their purchase behavior.
If you have more than one way of configuring your products, then don’t hesitate to show them to your consumers. Modern consumers love creativity and show interest to customize their products during their configuration process.
The worldwide popular shoe manufacturer Vans follows this best practice and allows its customers to configure their shoe parts as per their wishes. Once, customers start to customize their shoes during the product configuration they start feeling the configuration process a fun-filled activity and perform the checkout with more satisfaction.
5. Providing Saving & Resuming Option To Customer On Product Configuration Process
While allowing your consumers to configure the products, make sure you provide them the option to save and resume the configuration process. With this, they can save the product configuration process before leaving, jump back again to the configuration process and continue the purchase at any time.
This can be done in multiple ways
- By providing unique links to customer’s for configuring products
- Providing save option in customers individual accounts
- Utilizing the power of cookies to remember the preference with the help of the user’s system
The world’s popular multinational apparel manufacturing company Nike uses this practice on their product configurator. This enables their customers to save a design, editing the design right at the carting panel, and empowers users to switch to multiple designs quickly for the same products. Customers feel this intuitive process saves their precious time while configuring products using product configurators.
6. Give Customers The Option Of Star Over The Product Configuration
If your product configuration page doesn’t have the start-over option, then you should rethink your product configurator strategy. Customers often love to reset their whole configuration process and start again, if anything goes wrong instead of undoing all those features and variants they used before which may irritate customers.
Once again the American shoe manufacturer Vans uses this practice and does a great job by offering the ‘Start over’ option to the consumers. This enables consumers to start over their product configuration process whenever they want. Apart from offering satisfaction for consumers on configuring products, this practice allows consumers to stay longer and interact with your product configurator.
7. Give Transparency On Product Pricing
Having transparent pricing will always be a plus for eCommerce businesses. Using product configurators by the consumers will have an impact on product price sometimes because of the inclusion of extra features. This has to be highlighted to the consumers while configuring products so that they can know what kind of price they need to pay for the product in such configuration.
This can be done by indicating the features cost and how much it will cost extra when compared with the normal configuration. By highlighting the product cost right throughout the product configuration process will give them trust in having full control over the product cost upon their configuration.
The American-based electric vehicle manufacturing company Tesla, Inc. has introduced this price transparency on their product configurators. With this consumers will be aware of the product cost with all the additional features, Tesla offers 3 different financing options to its buyers and ensures they keep fully transparent on pricing.
For those who are thinking about using or creating your product configurators for your eCommerce business, this best practice section would help them. At the same time, we would like to inform you that Pimcore offers an exceptional platform where you can utilize any type of configurator for the products of your eCommerce business.
To know more about what the Pimcore platform offers for product configurators, feel free to get in touch with the Pimcore development experts.
Are you looking for a technology partner that has proven excellence in developing tailored product configurators for eCommerce businesses?
Bottom Line
Without any doubt, product configurators offer an exceptional practical solution to the modern eCommerce businesses facing trouble with the growing demands from consumers on personalization. Before picking the right product configurator, make sure you remember your target audience and long-term business goals.
To leverage all the benefits of product configuration, you need to consider a robust product information management platform that enables you with all the basic and advanced capabilities to manage product-related data and processes. Credencys has successfully implemented avant-grade PIM solutions along with product configurators for leading eCommerce brands. Let our PIM experts help you create splendid customer experiences, improve customer engagement & conversion, and increase sales & revenue.
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