Do you have a mug at home with a dedication from a friend or a calendar with family photos? And can you imagine looking for a new car without configuring it on the manufacturer’s website, if only to check what are the options or what will be the price in the highest version? Exactly! In many industries, configurators are already standard, and they are just reaching others. And very good, because both sides can benefit from them – both the customers and the producers themselves.

Product customization is money

The relationship between personalization and money is best illustrated by these 3 simple equations:

MONEY = TIME
TIME = AUTOMATION
AUTOMATION = PERSONALIZATION

The most valuable currency today, both in life and in business, is time. We convert time into money and vice versa. Every opportunity to save time is a benefit for your company. One of the ways to introduce time savings is to automate processes in the enterprise. Automation in e-commerce is a set of various practices, from production itself, through shipping or handling. One of the possibilities is also the personalization of the product offer and sales, and thus we come to product configurators that provide both.

Think – too many options to choose from in the online store mean chaos in the customer’s mind and the time that he has to spend on browsing the entire product category, reading all descriptions. Nobody likes wasting time, and for many people, shopping is stressful in itself. This may result in lower conversions.

What if you could replace the difficult choice of many options with the configuration of a product tailored to your needs? Maybe it is worth having a tool in your business that will match the order items for the customer, will not make a mistake in calculations and will also tell you what is the inventory of the products?

This is a win-win situation and no one has to compromise.

What is the product configurator?

The configurator is an e-commerce tool that helps to sell non-standard products, i.e. those that the manufacturer prepares to order for a specific customer. It can be a personalized product, such as engraved jewelry or a printed cap, or a product consisting of many elements, such as a piece of furniture.

There are many benefits offered by configurators, but from the entrepreneur’s point of view, two are particularly important – saving and earning, and here we come back to the 3 equations above.

How do product configurators automate sales?

Sales automation through personalization is based on 3 pillars. If you only take care of one, the effects will not be big, but if you approach the matter as a whole – you will quickly feel an increase in work efficiency and a higher conversion.

A. pillar – Automation of communication
It takes place both at the stage preceding the purchase of the product and during the ordering process. Its task is to speed up the exchange of information and lead the customer to a purchase, and not tire him or you as a seller along the way. What does automation of communication give?

– 24h availability – The customer has access to the configurator as well as to the entire online store without interruption – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
– Help with ordering specialized goods, e.g. construction goods – the configurator automatically indicates the necessary components, asks about their dimensions, and also suggests what else is necessary to place a given order. In the case of technical or construction industries, the configurator replaces a qualified advisor and assists the customer during purchases.
– Less human errors – this benefit is especially visible in B2B businesses, e.g. in the construction or furniture industry, where the product consists of many elements and orders are placed by contractors on a regular basis. Until now, in these businesses there was no question of sales automation, and orders were accepted by traders. And as it happens very often, the so-called the human factor was doing its job – there were many very costly mistakes. The implementation of configurators in such companies saves a lot of money, thanks to the fact that the configurator “asks” customers for all the information needed to complete the order. This eliminates understatement, wrong measurements or mistakes. The human factor is also present in B2C online stores – there, thanks to the configuration, we avoid the stage of a long e-mail exchange between the customer and the service, and between the Service Department and, for example, a graphic designer. The configurator allows you to “click” the order yourself.
– Excluding mismatched elements – it is not easy to order an item that consists of many components. Remember to add them all to your basket and make sure they match. The configurator does this for the customer and does not allow you to order incompatible items. No more disappointment and no replacement costs.
– Visualization of the final product in real time – the configurator shows on an ongoing basis how the product changes as a result of adding new parameters. The customer knows exactly what they are ordering and what the goods will ultimately look like.

B. pillar – Automation of the offer and orders
Automating the offer and order allows you to exit the “we always did it manually and it worked” mode. In the past, people only traveled on foot and somehow lived. And although we know the advantages of walking, cars make our lives much easier in everyday life. There are many examples of this type, and the conclusion is one – it is worth using technology that improves life and work. How do configurators accelerate the work of enterprises?

– Wholesale offer updates (photos, descriptions, parameters, price lists) – anyone who has ever had to manually update an offer with thousands of products knows what it entails. It’s a waste of time for the work that the algorithm can do.
– Taking care of availability – in large production companies it is impossible to track the inventory of all products without technology. The real-time configurators “communicate” with the warehouse and update the availability of components and goods. As a result, both the seller and the customer can be sure that the offer only shows available products, and the unavailable ones disappear from the page.
– Product price calculation – configurators calculate the individual product price on an ongoing basis based on component prices or more complex algorithms (e.g. counting volume, length, weight). In the case of B2B, it is also possible to calculate based on individual price lists per customer.

C. pillar – Automation of production and delivery
For the seller, this pillar is as important as the two previous ones, while for the customer it is the most visible part. Therefore, make sure that the customer’s contact with your store is pleasant, convenient and responsive to the needs. On the configurator side, automation means completing the elements needed to complete the order placed by the customer, and these are:

– Components of the configuration and their location in the warehouse – especially important for large production companies, e.g. furniture or construction.
– Generating previews / vectors and files, e.g. PDF for use in production – incredibly useful, but not so obvious functionality. Configurators allow you to generate and then send to the production department a file with the specification of the goods immediately after placing the order. This greatly speeds up the implementation of the entire process.
– Courier service and optimization of delivery costs – configurators also allow you to optimize transport costs, both for customers and for sellers. This is especially true for stores selling large or undersized products that are difficult to transport and therefore expensive.

In which industries is it worth personalizing products?

There are more and more businesses that have decided to introduce product configurators to their e-commerce. They are usually invested by retail stores (B2C) that hear and respond to their customers’ needs. Also, more and more B2B businesses are starting to notice both the demand for product personalization and the availability of technology.

Product configurators support especially those industries that produce goods to order, in accordance with his requirements, tastes or needs, e.g .:
– car,
– home & decor (e.g. blinds and shutters),
– food (e.g. chocolate, muesli),
– digital printing, gadgets,
– fashion (e.g. clothing, jewelry, watches, fashion accessories – handbags, phone cases),
– construction (e.g. gates and garage shelters, modular houses, windows and doors),
– furniture – furniture and interior design elements,
– photovoltaic.

Examples of earning / saving thanks to personalization in e-commerce

Fashion – shoes

Client
Creates a unique shoe pattern that it can identify with. The process of creating itself provides positive emotions – the client becomes a designer. He can see how the shoes change with the addition of new parameters. WOW effect guaranteed.

Producer
Thanks to the implementation of the configurator in its e-commerce, the manufacturer can communicate to customers the uniqueness of its offer (after all, not every shoe brand can boast the option of ordering shoes according to the customer’s design), and thus it is possible to increase prices. Customers are ready to pay more for brand emotions and a unique product.

Fashion – watch

Client
He expresses his individualism and designs a unique watch himself. Customers love personalized fashion accessories. This is one way to express your style and personality, and a higher price is often not an obstacle to buying.

Producer
There is no need to hire a graphic designer to visualize the client’s idea. Thanks to the configurator, the customer independently visualizes his project and then places an order. No unnecessary e-mail exchange, fast and in line with production possibilities.

Gifts – Chocolate Telegram

Client
The configurator manages the availability and stock of letters. The customer can see which letters he can use to create a chocolate message, so that there is no situation in which the customer places an order for an element that is not there. In addition, the configurator visualizes on an ongoing basis what the chocolate telegram looks like after each change.

Producer
Receives from the configurator a summary of all elements of the placed order at the current prices. The configurator also gives you the opportunity to “increase” sales, thanks to additional options, such as:
– offers customers personalization of the packaging by adding their own photo,
– suggests the content of telegrams for selected occasions, which can be ordered immediately or loaded and even modified – for many buyers such predefined content is a great facilitation and acceleration of placing an order.

Printing, prints, advertising gadgets

Client
He evaluates the final product on the visualization in real time and makes an informed purchase. Using the configurator eliminates the unnecessary disappointment of the customer after opening the package (“I did not know it would look like this …”)

Configurator
Automatically generates PDF files and sends them to be printed on the machine. Every minute you save on production is your profit.

Would you like to earn more with personalization?

The answer is obvious – everyone wants to earn more, and everyone who sells wants to develop it. Therefore, at the end, I propose a small test that will allow you to assess whether the product configurators will work for your company:
A. Have your customers ever asked about modifying your products? Maybe they wanted to change their dimensions a bit or add some element?
B. Or maybe you have always made products to order, but you accept them by phone or e-mail and thus waste a lot of time agreeing on details? Are there mistakes and customer dissatisfaction?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, it is a clear signal that either your customers expect personalized products or your business requires automation through configurators.

TikTok is still considered a new and fresh medium, although it was founded in 2016 – less than 5 years is a very long time in this world. However, this does not change the fact that for years TT has remained a bit disregarded in the western world, mainly due to the initial product targeting mainly on the Asian market. Whatever the reasons, 2020 definitely belonged to TikTok. In the first quarter of this year, it was the most downloaded application in the world.

TikTok – what is it about?

TikTok is a mobile application for Android and iOS, thanks to which we can publish short films in various forms. In 2017, the company managing TT, ByteDance, acquired the competitive Musical.ly application for nearly a billion dollars, which also allowed for the publication of short videos, and the available tools allowed for their simple editing – including synchronizing the character’s mouth movement on the video with the lyrics (the platform offered a large database of available songs thanks to an agreement with Warner Music Group and Apple Music). A few months later, Musical.ly was officially merged with TikTok.

The convenient and fast mechanism of editing and sharing films made the platform extremely popular, mainly among the youngest users of the Web, i.e. Generation Z. As a generation from an early age familiar with the use of computers and smartphones, they consume content slightly differently than the previous generations, which had to slowly learn the internet world. The average age of Facebook users is growing, so it seems natural that the youngest generation of internet users is looking for a field of expression elsewhere – in mid-2020, according to Statista, nearly one third of TikTok users in the US were under 20 years old, and over 60% were under 30. It should be noted, however, that TikTok itself does not officially confirm the data on the structure of its community and such data should be treated as an estimate.

As a platform based mainly on mobile solutions (it is possible to use the web interface on computers, but the vast majority of users “tick” on smartphones), TikTok is with users almost anywhere and at any time. It can be considered that TikTok and its mechanics are to some extent a catalyst for the implementation of the Stories format in subsequent social networks – after all, relations were introduced not only a few years ago by Instagram and Facebook, but – quite recently – also by LinkedIn and Twitter. TikTok movies are, in a sense, an extension of this form of communication – fast, dynamic and fleeting.

Pre-publication video on TikTok can be freely edited and processed thanks to built-in tools and filters. The short form of the films (up to a minute, if we use films created directly in the app; films uploaded from external sources may be longer) means that post-production does not require much effort, and watching the video itself is not time-consuming. It is on TikTok that challenges, i.e. various types of challenges, are experiencing their second Internet youth – sometimes sensible, sometimes less of course. We can also find here millions of home music videos, dance routines, charity actions, but also films with painful accidents or vulgar quarrels. Great opportunities to interact with videos posted by other users make the online life on TikTok very dynamic and engaging. According to a study by Businessofapps, in 2019 the average TT user spent nearly an hour a day on the application.

TikTok’s advertising and marketing potential

Due to the large community and the implemented advertising system, TikTok is an application that allows you to promote your own content and display it to a wide audience. As a “new” medium, based on slightly different solutions, it is a field with huge promotional potential, not yet fully exploited by marketers. The number of brands using ads on TikTok, however, is steadily increasing. With Shopify integration, advertisers can also easily promote their products in the app.

The individual TikTok ad formats and their specifications are described in an article on our blog: dimensions of graphics in social media.

TikTok allows brands to collaborate in two ways. The first is the traditional auction model using TikTok Ads Manager, based on very similar principles as, for example, Facebook’s advertising manager. Another solution is the reservation model, under which all activities are planned and agreed with one of the partnership managers cooperating with the platform – this is a solution dedicated to larger campaigns.

Like Twitter, TikTok promotes the most popular hashtags, which are called Trends on this platform. It is an excellent tool for using real-time marketing and “hooking” to the most dynamically growing topics – in short, TikTok seems to be a good place for the brand to always be there where something is going on.

TikTok and controversy

As is usual in the world of social media, several technological and ethical questions arose. TikTok has received heavy financial penalties from the US and South Korea for collecting personal data, separate proceedings are underway in other countries. The platform also struggles to some extent with the difficulty of verifying certain content, especially considering the fact that teenagers are a large proportion of users. In social media, great responsibility comes with great marketing power.

However, many marketers and SEOs forget that the Google network, although by far the most popular, does not handle one hundred percent of internet search traffic. The presence and good presentation of the company’s website in competitive search engines is also important – it will allow you to attract traffic and potential customers from sources that are sometimes ignored by the competition.

Microsoft Bing

The second most popular internet search engine in the world. Bing was founded in 2009 as a development of previous Microsoft services, such as Live Search, and even earlier MSN Search – you could say that the Redmond company made an ordinary rebranding. The name of the search engine is sometimes ironically referred to as an abbreviation of Bing Is Not Google, which apparently functions in Microsoft itself as an internal company joke.

Please note that the search engine is built into Windows – the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Thanks to the agreement between enterprises, Bing also largely powers the Yahoo search engine – this former Internet hit (although mainly in the US), according to StatCounter, today has about 1.5% of the market share.

Naturally, due to the common producer, Bing supports search using the Microsoft Cortana virtual assistant. Less obvious, however, is that Bing is what Amazon Alexa uses.

Bing is a search engine that is part of a large package of services. For marketing and e-commerce, we get the entire Microsoft Advertising infrastructure, which works in a similar way as Google Ads – it has millions of customers and huge sales potential. However, even in its basic form, it is worth taking care of proper positioning in the Bing search engine – it is a service associating millions of users around the world.

Bing is set as the default search engine in Microsoft Edge and can be selected as the main search engine in Firefox, Edge, Google Chrome, and Safari.

Useful tools for the marketer:
– Bing Webmaster Tools
– Microsoft Advertising

Yandex

Yandex has existed in various forms since 1990, but as yandex.ru it was officially presented in 1997 – so it was formally established a few months earlier than Google. According to one theory, the name is self-ironic and comes from the Yet Another Indexer (another indexing tool).

As a search engine aimed at the Russian-language market, it has achieved considerable success, currently serving more than 50% of traffic related to Internet searches in the territory of the Russian Federation. Naturally, of all search engines, Yandex is the best at processing Cyrillic characters. Like Google or Microsoft, Yandex offers a number of other options and functionalities in addition to the search engine – from a web browser, through a GPS-based navigation system, cloud storage space, to an extensive display advertising network.

The version for the Russian market can be found at yandex.ru, while the western version can be found at yandex.com.

If your customers are located in the Russian Federation, you cannot afford to disregard the search engine used by tens of millions of Internet users. Yandex also supports the Yandex.Direct network, which is a system that displays ads, among others, on the search network – similar to Google and Bing.

Yandex can be set as the default search engine in the Microsoft Edge browser and (when added to the list) in Google Chrome.

Useful tools for the marketer:
– Yandex Webmaster Tools
– Yandex Metrica – yandex equivalent of Google Analytics, completely free, just like GA
– Yandex.Direct

DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a search engine that was established in 2008. Its original name comes from the popular children’s game. The search engine is also available at the easier-to-enter addresses duck.com and ddg.gg. DuckDuckGo is gaining market share slowly, but is growing steadily – in 2021, nearly 100 million inquiries are entered into it every day.

DuckDuckGo uses a completely different model than Google or Bing. DDG does not collect data about the user and does not profile search results – it displays the same results to everyone, regardless of the previous activities of a given person in the network. Focusing on privacy is the main reason why the project is steadily increasing its popularity – some Internet users do not feel comfortable with the fact that various websites, search engines and applications collect a lot of data, even if they are anonymised and do not allow the identification of a specific user.

Disabling profiling has both advantages and disadvantages. The user is thus cut off from the content (or at least not getting it right away), which statistically most likely hits what he was looking for. Profiling in the context of searching for products or information makes purchasing sense and clearly facilitates finding data quickly.

DuckDuckGo mainly uses its own solutions, such as the DuckDuckBot crawler, but also many external sources – including Binga. This means that by optimizing the page to best meet the requirements of Microsoft’s search engine, you also help in positioning the site in DDG. The above-mentioned Bing Webmaster Tools comes with the basic help – with it you can check errors and see useful tips.

If you run a local business, make sure you have Apple Maps in your maps – DDG uses the AM database for this purpose, thanks to which your business will be displayed to users of both search engines.

In Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari, DuckDuckGo is one of the default search options – just select it as the main search engine in the settings.

Amazon

Interestingly, when it comes to searching for products, Google has been losing to another big player – Amazon for several years. According to Jumpshot reports, already in the second quarter of 2018, the e-commerce giant reached 54% of internet shopping traffic. For this reason, Firefox has allowed the use of Amazon Search as the default search engine for a long time. It does not matter much for the service sector or content websites, but when it comes to the typical sale of products on the Web, the presence on the Amazon platform is of great value for producers and stores.

YouTube

In many cases, YouTube is also an important source of traffic. Although it is not strictly a sales portal, as the largest video site in the world, YouTube is a great tool for increasing brand awareness. Millions of customers look for reviews there, watch unboxing, discuss product quality or customer service. Therefore, it is worth at least monitoring the buzz around the brand on YouTube, and it is best to focus your content activities on constant presence on the platform and proper brand exposure.