Visual Product Customization Tool: Laravel Development Study

Visual product customization solutions have taken the world of eCommerce by the storm due to their ability to create, personalize, and live-preview products online. Users can customize eCommerce products with colours, text, and dimensions of their choice. As a result, the market for customized products is expanding and so is the need for developing an online visual product customizer tool for eCommerce owners.

Ecommerce businesses of every size recognize the immense potential a visual product customizer carries for their store. The technology has seen similar adoptions from the eCommerce giants such as Nike and the local vendors exploring the best of an online presence. Nevertheless, the technology has helped the ecommerce world in numerous ways:

• Revenue: Conversions increase by up to 30% when an eCommerce store offers visual product customization, while customers are likely to pay 20% more for the personalization.
• Customer engagement: Visually customizing a product is creative and your customers are likely to spend up to 40% more time playing around with your products and finding one with a deeper connection.
• Customer satisfaction: Finding a product in your store and that too with the exact colour combinations you fancy – what more can a customer ask for?
• Social promotion: A satisfied customer is more likely to share the personalized product on social media along with the utter ease at configuring them. With almost 80% of customers likely to make purchases on friends’ suggestions, every share provides potential leads.
• Better insights: Up to 25% of customers share personal details in order to receive personalized eCommerce products, helping the business better plan future strategies.
• Inventory management: With the desired freedom for your customers to build products, you have clear information regarding the best product variants by your side. Your inventory is powered by data and planning.

With that in mind, the Laravel development team at The Brihaspati Infotech recently helped a client build a Laravel based visual product customizer that can be readily integrated into an existing website like a plug-and-play tool.

The following GIF offers a glimpse of the custom visual product configurator we designed for our client:

Client Requirement: Develop Visual Product Customization Software

• The client wanted a web application where users can select dimensions of the product
• The users can customize the colour combinations of the product
• Users can add accessories to the product
• Preview the customizations in real-time

The Challenges:

There are several readily available solutions that can meet the requirements. However, businesses are unique. The client offered customized hammocks that came in multiple sizes, colours, and customizable accessories that were available for certain product variants only. We had two major roadblocks at developing the solution:

• Nested Customization: The client wanted to offer accessories for selected product customizations. As a result, the customer’s selection clearly has an impact on further customizations.
• Readily integrating solution: The client didn’t want to affect the customer experience of the existing website and only wanted a tool that works like a plug-and-play visual product customizer solution.

Developing Custom Visual Product Customizer with Laravel: Our Approach

We analyzed the client’s business and the pitfalls in offering online services. Clearly, the available solutions were nowhere close to what the client expected. We, thus, came with the idea to build a visual product customization software from the ground up.

We discussed the wireframes and complete workflow with the client, thus assuring a pleasant purchase experience for the customers. 

Features offered by our Visual Product customizer:

• Product customization at multiple stages
• Nested customization
• Infinite combinations of multiple colours
• Live Preview customized product
• Visual product information

Our Implementation: Custom Visual Product Customization Software

Considering that the client’s existing eCommerce website already gained enough traffic, it was thus imperative that the custom solution developed at our end offers a very similar experience. Laravel offered an upper hand at delivering a lightning-fast web application Moreover, we ensured the Laravel-based custom visual product customizer smoothly integrates with the existing system.

How it works

Select Product Size

The Hammocks offered by the client’s store came in different sizes. In the absence of any product customizer application, the variants were added as separate products. Not only did it make the website bulky, but also made it difficult for customers to find a product variant of their choice.

The custom Visual product customization software developed by us allows users to find the desired product variant from the same place. As a result, the customers don’t have to search the entire product catalog.

The product display responds to the selected product size. We have added a separate section named “Technical Information” that provides sufficient details about the selected product variant.

Select Product Colours

The Hammocks offered by the client’s store came in multiple colour combinations. While the business was capable of offering an infinite number of colour combinations, the store wasn’t equipped enough. 

We created intuitive options for choosing colour combinations with ease. Customers can readily select primary and secondary colours for their hammocks, and the visual product customizer tool generates a preview for the custom-designed product. The customers can readily find colour combinations that best suit their purpose.

Adding Accessories

The client wanted to provide accessories along with the main product (Hammock). While few accessories are optional, the rest are mandatory. We created custom options based on the purpose they solved.

The tool offers separate sections for both the accessories. It is worth noticing that the tool automatically selects the compulsory item while a user is required to select the “Add” button for optional accessories, as shown below:

Nested Customization

One of the major challenges in developing the visual product customizer with Laravel was to come up with the idea to serve specific customizations. Few products in the client’s store were unique. The products clearly had a different set of customizations as compared to the rest.

Excluding such products from the tool wasn’t an option as it would take the store to square one- making it bulky. Our experts created custom modules to ensure the store offers nested customization. As a result, when a customer opts for the selected product variants, few options are automatically locked as shown below:

With that, the Laravel experts at The Brihaspati Infotech have successfully delivered a Laravel based custom online product customizer tool for a client. While the scope of this project was confined to Hammock alone, the tool can cater to any online store that sells customizable products. Our experts can tailor the solution for your unique needs.

Our experts have developed different types of product configurators for major eCommerce platforms, including Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. You can read more about our accomplishments from the following:

Our ecommerce product customization archive:
Product Customization Tools

Final words on Developing Visual Product Customizer

A visual product customizer bridges the long known gap between online and offline purchase experience. Your customers are more likely to experience the custom products before actually purchasing it, which gives you an edge over your competitors. 

If you too are looking for a visual product customization solution that readily integrates to your store and enhances customer engagement on your store, you can always reach out to us. Our experts will help you convert ideas to complete business solutions