Ecommerce for bespoke, customisable products
In the last few months, online purchasing has gone through the roof, and many businesses have had to adapt quickly or face not trading at all. Okay, if you’re a ‘one size fits all’ operation, what if your business success is built on bespoke, customisable products? These retailers or manufacturers are still questioning whether their more unique or bespoke offering is something that even has a place within e-commerce. Yet as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and therefore, many bespoke businesses are now looking to E-commerce as the answer.
BUSINESS THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY
Many bespoke manufacturing or retail businesses have also built up a loyal customer base the old-fashioned way, where personal contact and offering individual solutions to unique challenges are the main reasons for their success. What can e-commerce offer them?
There are almost too many product addon options to put into this article, however, we decided to focus on the most important and sought-after options that vastly improve the customer’s shopping experience.
THE GAME CHANGER FOR BESPOKE PRODUCT ECOMMERCE
At Red Thread Creative, we think WooCommerce is amazing at providing a strong platform for selling products or services online. It can do just about anything you can think of in terms of e-commerce and supporting online sales. However, selling bespoke, customisable products online can be a tricky matter when using any E-commerce platform, including WooCommerce. While you can apply as many attributes as you like to a product, such as colours, sizes, and finishes and also affect the pricing structure for those choices, the process can be quite labour intensive and a bit slow, methodically changing prices individually for many combinations of attributes. This can be speeded up using spreadsheets with a premium WooCommerce import tool, but that, too can get extremely frustrating. That‘s why, at Red Thread Creative, we offer our global ‘add-ons’ method. This enables you to add attributes to ranges of products globally; it really is a game-changer, allowing e-commerce customers to specify and readily obtain accurate pricing when selecting bespoke, customisable products at point-of-purchase.
E-COMMERCE PRODUCT CUSTOMISATION FEATURES
One of the many features of our customisable platform is a method for online customers to add their own information to the product specification. This could be a unique modification such as how the product will need to work alongside another or accommodate a specific third-party appliance.
Another great feature of our WooCommerce product customisation is that we can add image swatches easily. We love visual communication, and being able to add artwork or high-quality photography which illustrates product features at point-of-purchase is brilliant for sales.
We have also got you covered when communicating an additional charge if bespoke options are applied to bespoke, customisable products. We are able to set whichever additional charge you wish for the customisation, and it gets added to the total price. Even better is that a customer can modify a product and see the subsequent price changes within the shopping basket without having to start purchasing all over again. Customers going back and forth with customisations happens more often than you might think, and a good reason for having the list of customisations applied to a product’s basket invoice.
We offer many other superb features within our e-commerce product customisation service. Some of the most valuable attributes are the delivery date picker, checkboxes, selection buttons, name your price, image swatches, text boxes, image uploads, and calculations. Calculations are complex and we could easily write a whole essay on how to use them.
APPLYING LOGIC
A really cool feature provided within our WooCommerce product customisation is the ability to hide or display any product add-on when specific attributes are selected. This is called conditional logic and we love it. For example, if a customer selects a specific attribute, say a type of product quality such as ‘premium’, this would then reveal a range of options only available to those premium products. A great E-commerce feature for manufacturing businesses where options can be limited or expanded upon depending on the construction or material quality selected.
This all makes e-commerce work superbly well for businesses that have a very bespoke, unique offering. It allows them to communicate product variables and combinations of options with the ability to display the impact those customisations will have on the final product price.
If your business needs a very different, unique E-commerce solution, give us a call or drop us a line. Our e-commerce team would love to hear the ECommerce challenges you’re facing and provide the perfect solution.