3D furniture models for online shopping: what must be right

A furniture 3D model is a file of a few megabytes that sits on a product page. The shopper spins the product in the page and then stands it in their own room through the phone camera. Describing it is the easy part. The hard part is that a furniture model has to be right, because a wrong one does more damage than a photograph. A photograph that flatters is normal retail. A model that lies about size is a return.

This article covers the three things a furniture model has to get right, why each is difficult, and what shoppers do with the model once it is on the page.

Scale

The question a furniture shopper has is whether the thing fits. On the floor, and also next to the sofa they already own, under the window, in a hallway with a radiator.

A model answers that only if its dimensions are exact. The phone places the model at the size the file says. If the seat height in the file is 45 centimetres and the real chair is 43, the model looks convincing and is wrong, and the shopper finds out on delivery day. Two centimetres is the clearance under a table.

So the first thing we ask a client for is measurements. A modeller can work out a shape from photographs. Nobody can work out a seat height. The commonest reason a first furniture model takes longer than planned is that the measurement sheet arrives in pieces.

Materials

Geometry is quick and materials are slow. A sofa is a box with cushions on it, and an artist builds that shape in a morning. Getting the fabric to read as that fabric, under a window in the afternoon and under a ceiling light in the evening, takes the rest of the week.

• The weave. A flat colour swatch makes a sofa look like plastic. Real fabric has a texture that catches light differently from each angle, and that is what tells the eye it is cloth.
• The sheen. Powder-coated steel, brushed brass and oiled oak reflect differently. Get this wrong and the metal looks like painted wood.
• The wood grain. Anyone who has shopped for furniture can tell oak, ash and walnut apart at a glance. One generic wood texture on all three tells the shopper nobody checked.
• The wear. Leather creases where people sit. A leather model with no creasing looks like vinyl.

Clients underestimate this part, and shoppers notice it without being able to say why. When MELIMELI added a sofa configurator, the fabric library was most of the build. A shopper choosing between eleven upholstery options is deciding on a material, and the model has to carry that decision.

Joins

The third thing is how parts meet. Where a chair leg enters the seat, where a drawer front sits in its frame, where a cushion meets the arm of a sofa.

Real furniture has tolerances. Parts have a small shadow gap, a visible seam, a tiny radius on every cut edge, because nothing manufactured is a perfect sharp corner. A model built in a hurry has legs pushed into the seat like two shapes overlapping, and edges sharp enough to cut. The eye reads that as a computer image in about a second, on a phone, without knowing why.

Joins are also what let the model survive rotation. Shoppers do turn a chair round, and the back is where a hurried model falls apart.

What shoppers do with it

The third row is the furniture-specific one. Sweef sells modular sofas, where the question is which combination of pieces suits the room. The configurator lets the shopper build the combination and place it in the living room at true size with web AR before ordering.

The 3D product viewer entry in the glossary covers what the viewer itself does and how it gets on the page.

The published numbers

Shopify reported in 2020 that products with 3D or AR content converted 94 percent more often than comparable products without. Its published customer results include Rebecca Minkoff, where shoppers who viewed a product in 3D were 44 percent more likely to add it to cart and 65 percent more likely to buy after viewing it in AR, and Gunner Kennels, which cut its return rate by 5 percent.

Those merchants also improved their product pages in other ways at the same time, and the baseline matters, so read the figures as a direction rather than a promise. Every published case points the same way, which is that more accurate product information sells more and comes back less. For furniture the order value is high and a return is a van rather than a parcel.

Where to start

Do not start with the catalogue. Start with one product, preferably a mid-price bestseller with several variants, because that is where the effect is easiest to see against a known baseline. Give the modeller a full measurement sheet and close-up photographs of every material. Put the model on the page, leave everything else alone for a month, and look at what the conversion rate and the return rate did.

We build that first model for nothing so you can run that test. Send us one product with dimensions and photos, and the model is yours whether or not you carry on. The solutions page covers the full service and the prices page has the monthly cost per product.

Sources

• Shopify, merchant data on 3D and AR content, September 2020.
• Shopify, AR shopping: Rebecca Minkoff and Gunner Kennels results.
• Shopify, 3D ecommerce guide.