How to sell bikes online with 3D models and configurators

A bike is hard to sell from a photo. It is expensive, its sizes are given in numbers that few people can picture, and much of what the buyer pays for is bolted on afterwards. Bike shops have always dealt with this by inviting the customer in and putting them on a bike.

A website can't do that. Anyone selling bikes or e-bikes online needs to know which of the questions that used to be answered in the shop a 3D model on a product page can answer, and which it can't.

What a bike buyer wants to know

Fit comes first: frame size, standover height, reach and seat height range. It stops many people before the checkout.

Looks next: the colour under normal light, the frame from the side and from three quarters, how thick an e-bike's downtube is with the battery in it, and whether the welds are tidy.

Accessories are the third question. Racks, mudguards, lights, panniers, a child seat or a bigger battery all belong here, and on cargo bikes they make up most of the purchase.

The fourth is where the bike will live. Cargo bikes and longtails don't fit in a normal hallway or a normal lift, and people often find this out after delivery.

A 3D model on the page answers the last three well. It answers fit only in part, and a project should be planned with that limit in mind.

Frame size is the part 3D does not solve

Bike fit depends on the rider's body as much as on the frame. Inseam, torso, arm length, flexibility and riding style all come into it. A 3D viewer can't measure a person, and we don't know of a phone-based body scan that gets a bike fit right.

3D does make the geometry easier to read. A frame the shopper can rotate, with standover height and seat height range drawn on it as dimension lines, is easier to understand than a geometry table with eighteen rows of millimetres. With a human silhouette of a stated height next to it, the shopper can make the comparison themselves, though not as well as a fitting would.

The rest of sizing has nothing to do with 3D. You need a size chart keyed to rider height, inseam guidance and a returns policy that says what happens if the size is wrong, before any 3D work.

AR shows whether the bike fits where it will be kept

AR answers the fourth question better than anything else does. From a link on the product page, the phone's own AR viewer places a correctly scaled model in the room, with nothing to install.

A cargo bike is around two and a half metres long, and people buy one and then find that it doesn't turn in their hallway, doesn't fit the bike shed or won't go into the lift. A shopper who places the bike in their own hallway before ordering avoids that return. Returning one means a freight pickup, and it often comes back scratched.

Accessories are the reason to build a configurator

We built a configurator for Livelo, who sell cargo bikes; it's shown on our solutions page. Frame colour alone wouldn't have justified it. A cargo bike purchase runs through a chain of decisions. The buyer picks frame and colour, then the box or the flatbed, then the rain cover, child seats and lighting, and then a battery size that depends on how heavily they plan to load the bike.

On a product page this is a long options table. In a configurator the shopper sees the box, the cover and the seats appear on the bike as each one is chosen. That pattern, options drawn on the product as they are picked, is one of the kinds described in the glossary under product configurator.

We haven't measured attach rates on it. What we see in our projects is that the accessory appears on the product while the decision is still open, which a related-products row at the bottom of the page can't do.

You can try the same pattern on a different product on our configurator page, where the modules and fabrics of a sofa behave the same way. For a city e-bike, frame colour, size and rack follow the same idea, and how an e-bike configurator works walks through it with a model you can try.

The order to build things in

Step 1 is also where your own conversion numbers come from.

Bikes share frames, wheels and components across a range, so once the first two or three frames exist the later models cost much less.