The Ultimate Product Manager's Guide for Selling Configurable Products

As a product manager, you’re faced with the unique challenges of bringing new, on-trend products to market that grow your brand and your sales. Increasingly, this means developing configurable products that let your shoppers customize in real time. Developing this complex, manufactured-to-order product is just the first step. Selling it is the ultimate challenge. 

Your enemy throughout this journey? Complexity. 

Configurable products mean complex processes that are often costly and time consuming. Production can be overwhelming, especially when it involves manual work, existing systems that can’t handle product variations and all the supply chain challenges involved with adding new items.

When a customer asks you to bring their dream product to life, how will you respond? The answer is Threekit. 

We’ve outlined the most common challenges facing Product Managers today along with strategies on how to get more of your unique products into the hands of your customers. 

Showing customizable products in real time

Selling configurable products means selling a near-limitless stream of product variations. Showing customers every variation of your product can be tricky. As you guide them through design reviews and feedback cycles, you want them to visualize every possibility. Your ability to pivot quickly is the difference between that product remaining an idea or becoming a reality. 

Show every product possibility with Threekit

Threekit’s exclusive technology platform allows you to design and produce product variations quickly, so your customers can see every product they can imagine. With our visual configurator, you’ll create variations in real time, developing the 3D base models that sell more product options and more products overall. 

How? Well, we’re a true product configurator.

This means we don’t just show shoppers an amazing customizable visual on the front end. Our platform has a robust rules-and-logic engine that dictates how customers can build the features they want, while enabling the processes required to actually manufacture that product once they’ve clicked the buy button.  

Plus, you can guide the entire process based on previous configurations and your personal experience with your customers. 

Endless SKUs = endless problems

Consider the millions – or even billions – of SKUs needed to cover every potential configuration of a specific product. Few ecommerce platforms and commerce systems are equipped to handle that many SKUs, especially if only a small percentage of those variations get sold. And while adding SKUs can be a sign of growing product lines, they can also raise a slew of new challenges:

Supply chains can become inefficient, as each SKU demands a production pause that may affect delivery time and profits.

Bottom line, a flat SKU structure just doesn’t work for creating limitless variations, as it won’t scale effectively. You need the ability to add SKUs dynamically, while side-stepping the drag and mess of a manual SKU/BOM process between order and fulfillment. You’re more likely to sell a product if you can show all the variants in real time, giving every unique design a shot in the spotlight.

Create SKUs on demand with Threekit

Threekit can help you ease SKU proliferation and the headaches that go with it. Our platform delivers a range of interactive visual experiences, from 3D visualizers to augmented reality, that let your customers design a virtual product to their exact specifications before it becomes a reality. This reduces manual review cycles by eliminating slow and costly custom renders and expensive photography, while simultaneously reducing the number of SKUs being added to the system. 

Delivering the immersive product experience your customers crave

Your customer experience should be more than just a transaction. Customers feel a sense of agency when they become a part of the process rather than waiting for the design to magically appear. In fact, they’re demanding it. A whopping 67% of online shoppers say they prefer ecommerce sites with 3D and AR capabilities to those with simple product images.

While your team is managing long, demanding review cycles and the mountains of behind-the-scenes manual work, your customer remains on the sidelines. If they’re not directly involved in the design experience, taking an active part in customizing the product, their ownership diminishes along with their confidence in the outcome. 

Your customers want to review visuals in real time, they want to interact with the product in their own space, and understand all the possibilities. This is just not feasible within a traditional sales cycle. But it is with Threekit.

 If you have a highly customizable product, you have to show all of its glorious configurations without missing a beat. If your current experience doesn’t lift expectations and fully engage your customer, you’re missing out.