Newsroom

The standard way to sell an accessory online is a row of small product cards under the description, headed "You may also like". It works about as well as it sounds. The shopper has already decided what they came for, the row is visually separate from the thing they are buying, and the accessory is shown on a white background with no relationship to the product above it.

A configurator changes the position of that question. Instead of being asked afterwards whether you would also like a rack, you are asked while you are building the thing, and you see the rack on it. That is a different sales moment, and it is the main commercial reason a configurator earns its cost beyond the return-rate argument.

Three kinds of add-on, and which ones a configurator suits

The distinction matters because teams building their first configurator often try to put the whole accessory catalogue in it. An item that cannot be seen on the product does not benefit from being in a 3D tool. It just makes the interface longer.

The cargo bike case

We built a configurator for Livelo, who sell cargo bikes. A cargo bike is an unusually good product for this because almost nothing about it is a single decision. Frame and colour, then the box or the flatbed, then the rain cover, then child seats, then lighting, then the battery size that depends on how heavily you plan to load it.

Sold as a product page with an options table, that is a form. Sold as a configurator, it is a bike on screen that visibly gains a box when you choose the box, visibly gains a cover over the box, and visibly grows two seats inside it when you add children. The accessory stops being a line item and becomes part of the picture of the thing you are about to own.

We are not going to attach a percentage to that, because we have not measured it in a way that would survive scrutiny and there is no honest published number for configurator attach rates. What we can say about the mechanism is that the accessory is shown in context, at the moment the buying decision is still open, on the product it belongs to. Every one of those three is a known weakness of the related-products row.

You can try the pattern on a different product on our own configurator page, where the modules and fabrics of a sofa work the same way.

What the published evidence actually covers

Merchant-reported figures for 3D and AR are about conversion and cart behaviour rather than attach rate. Shopify reported in 2020 that interactions with products carrying 3D or AR content converted 94 percent more often than comparable products without. Rebecca Minkoff reported that shoppers who viewed a product as a 3D model were 44 percent more likely to add it to cart, and 27 percent of those who added were more likely to place an order, with a 65 percent lift in purchases among shoppers who viewed in AR.

Note what those numbers are and are not. They say people who engage with 3D buy more often. They do not say people who engage with 3D buy more per order. If anyone quotes you an average order value uplift specific to configurators, ask which catalogue it came from.

Design rules that decide whether the add-ons sell

Show the price change immediately, next to the option. A configurator that reveals the total only at the end teaches shoppers to be cautious with every click. One that updates a visible running total as you add the cargo box teaches them what things cost, and they explore more.

Put the accessory where the decision is. The rain cover option belongs next to the box, not in a separate accessories tab. Group options by the part of the product they attach to.

Let the shopper take things off. Some brands start fully loaded to inflate the anchor price. It reads as a trick, and the first thing an experienced shopper does is strip it back with suspicion. Start at a defensible base and make the additions feel like their idea.

Do not model the accessory badly. An add-on rendered worse than the base product actively discourages the sale. If you cannot build the rack to the same standard as the bike, leave it out until you can.

Carry the configuration to the cart in plain language. "Cargo bike, sand, long box, rain cover, two child seats" is a line a customer can check. A SKU string is not.

Where it goes wrong

The most common failure is a configurator that offers forty options with no defaults. Choice paralysis is real, and a product that arrives pre-configured to a sensible, popular specification converts better than a blank one, provided the shopper can see what is included and change it.

The second is options that do not exist in the factory. A configurator that lets someone combine a box and a child seat that physically conflict produces an order somebody has to phone about. The rules have to come from production.

The third is performance. A configurator that loads for eight seconds on a phone on mobile data never gets to sell anything. Model weight, texture size and lazy loading of the optional parts are not technical details, they are the difference between a tool that sells and a tool that gets abandoned.

What it costs

Our pricing is per product per month. Basic starts at 10 dollars per product per month on a twelve-month term with a minimum of 100 variants, which fits a catalogue conversion. Value starts at 20 dollars per model per month on a twenty-four-month term and is the tier most configurators sit in, because the base product plus its attachable parts is more work than a single static model. Enterprise is quoted.

If you want to see whether your accessories look good attached, pick the product with the longest options list in your range. Send it to us and we will model it free for you to keep.

Sources

• Shopify, merchant data on 3D and AR content, September 2020.
• Shopify, 3D e-commerce and AR shopping.