In this blog post, you’ll learn how to create customizable products for your Shopify online store. You’ll also learn about the pros and cons of doing this on your own versus integrating a dedicated product customization software platform.
So, let’s start with the basics.
Why would you want to sell customizable products on your Shopify ecommerce store in the first place?
Shopify and their enterprise offering, Shopify Plus, are quickly becoming synonymous with ecommerce.
The company currently holds 31% of the ecommerce market in the United States.
The platform supports more than 1,000,000 online businesses globally, covering every product category you can think of. And of course, helping your competitors sell their products online, just like you do.
Product customization is a key strategy you can use to set your Shopify store apart from competitors. Just using the text comment fields in your checkout cart to specify product parameters will no longer suffice.
The benefits of product customization and personalization are clear. They give your brand a competitive edge, boost customer loyalty, and help increase average order value (AOV).
Allowing your customers to personalize the product colors, materials, text, and more can be a key differentiator in an evolving, hyper-competitive ecommerce marketplace.
Personalization, experience, and engagement are the cornerstones of success for your ecommerce venture. Adding custom Shopify fields and giving customers configuration options that can be integrated with the cart during checkout usually requires some coding experience.
If you’re selling bracelets, you may want to let customers add a note to a product for you to engrave the item. You can find out how to add line item properties in Shopify using some of their community documentation. Keep in mind it’s an advanced tutorial requiring knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Liquid Templates.
To start, you’ll need to create a new template of your current theme from the Shopify Dashboard. Once you’ve saved a copy of your current theme, how you add the code will depend on whether you use a sectioned (newer) or non-sectioned (older) theme.
In sectioned themes, you’ll need to find the right section to add your custom field’s code. For non-sectioned fields, you can add the code above the submit part of your template. The Shopify UI Elements Generator can help you design your line item properties. You can then add the code to your newly created product templates using the instructions provided.
Setting up and running a successful ecommerce business no longer depends on your programming skills. The success of Shopify shows that giving users a sleek and intuitive experience will foster trust, build long-term loyalty, and give you a competitive edge in an increasingly agile business environment.
You now have the option of choosing a product customization platform that can support your business goals, scale effectively, and deliver real value to your customers. Most Shopify-ready customizer apps come with some form of specialty, but you should look out for the following features.
Whether you’re starting with a premium template or not, you’ll want to control your product’s configurations from a central location with minimal effort. Customers may want to change colors, add their own images, or add text in a certain font and size. Deploying these features should not require advanced coding skills.
Customers like to view their products from different angles and ensure they know what they're getting before they buy. When choosing a product customization platform for Shopify, look for a solution that allows you to display multiple views of your products in 2D. Better yet, you can opt for a solution that allows for 3D or augmented reality (AR) product visualization. The ability to view a product in different colors from any angle, especially in 3D or AR, will increase your conversion rates.
Keeping track of your orders, shipments, inventories, and suppliers is challenging enough. To manage your shop’s experience, you’ll want an intelligent user interface that reduces your administrative efforts while giving you maximum flexibility.
Your solution should allow you to manage deployments, attributes, and products from a central admin console. Ideally, you can guide your customers towards different product bundles using their latest selections to increase order values.
The best product customization platforms incorporate features that improve your entire customer experience from product detail page (PDP) to checkout. Look for a solution that provides sleek product visualization on both the PDP and in the checkout cart.
You should also consider features like dynamic pricing. This means the product price should update automatically as the user selects different customizations or according to any bundling or specials you may be running.
Shopify, at its heart, is a global ecommerce platform. Support for multiple languages and currencies that go along with your product customization will help increase your draw in new customers and shoppers in every corner of the world. Scaling your operations to a global audience shouldn’t require a team of multi-national agents; opt for a modern platform that has these features integrated with its personalization settings.
When customizing your Shopify products, you’ll need to confirm all available options look great on all devices and don’t render awkwardly compared to the original template’s design. If you’re using a platform that allows you to preview changes and how they will display on different devices, you can test your customizations and make sure you don’t deploy any new product pages that fail to render properly.
After ensuring the product customization solution integrates with Shopify, you’ll also want to ensure it integrates with other important systems. This may include inventory management, ERP, or point of sale (POS) systems (if you plan to use the customization software in-store as well as online).
Integration across all relevant systems is key to ensuring your ability to fulfill each customized product order efficiently and cost-effectively. And above all, it helps ensure your customers are satisfied with the experience and will keep returning to your brand in the future.
Sharing unique product designs with followers, subscribers, and across major social media channels shouldn’t be a burden. With the right custom product builder for Shopify, you can allow your customers to create social media posts and broadcast their personalized designs, increasing your organic reach.
Reach should always factor into your platform decisions. Not all services operate equally well in every geographical region. China, for instance, is still an attractive consumer base, but reaching them will require more integration with localized social media platforms than Shopify currently supports. The ideal platform will allow you to market to most consumer bases with ease.
ConfigureID is a versatile and consolidated product customization platform that can help you take control of your customers’ ecommerce experiences. Our full-featured solution makes it possible to add custom product options without the need to add any code to your site.
With photorealistic 3D product visualizations, multi-language support, and extensive customization options, you can expand your customer experiences in a central, easy-to-manage environment. ConfigureID gives you a product customization platform that seamlessly integrates with your Shopify ecommerce store.
Looking for a custom product builder for your Shopify store that gives you a competitive edge and helps boost revenue? Schedule your personalized demo of ConfigureID now!
