When a product configurator pays for itself, and when it does not
A configurator earns its cost when the number of buildable combinations is far larger than the number you can photograph. Below that line, more photographs are cheaper and better. Above it, most of what you sell has never been pictured, and the buyer is being asked to imagine the thing he is about to pay for.
The prototype we built was a task chair: three frames, four upholsteries, two bases, an optional headrest and two armrest choices. That is ninety-six buildable chairs. The camera ever got to four of them.
That gap is the whole decision. Ninety-two of the ninety-six configurations have no picture, so a buyer choosing one of them is being asked to imagine it — and a buyer who has to imagine an expensive thing usually decides to think about it later.
The arithmetic
| Combinations | What to do | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under about a dozen | Photograph them all | Real photographs beat any render, and shooting twelve is a day’s work |
| Dozens to hundreds | Build the configurator | You will never photograph them, and the unphotographed ones are most of what you sell |
| Effectively unlimited | Configurator, plus a quote instead of a price | At that variety the price is no longer a lookup either |
Count the buildable combinations before anything else. It is a multiplication you can do in a minute, and it answers the question more honestly than any discussion about what competitors have.
Three rules that decide whether people finish it
- Show the change, do not describe it. When the buyer adds the headrest, a headrest appears on the picture. A line of text saying "headrest included" is the thing he was trying to avoid reading.
- Ease the change, do not switch it. When the upholstery changes colour, it should transition rather than cut. A hard swap reads as a different product; an eased one reads as the same chair, which is what it is.
- Only include options that change the price or the picture. Anything else is a question you are asking for your own convenience, and every question costs you finishers.
The output is the point
A configurator that ends with a pretty picture has done half a job. What the buyer needs at the end is something he can act on: a configuration code, a specification list, a saved link — something that carries his choices into the enquiry, the quote and eventually the order without anyone retyping them.
That is also where the internal value sits. A configuration code that travels from the website into the order means the factory builds what the buyer chose, rather than what someone understood from an email. The number of build errors that come from a re-typed specification is the cost you are actually removing.
Part of
An export site is a structure problem before it is a content problemWhat we decided first when a client handed us a product line and no page requirements at all, and why the order of those decisions matters more than the copy.