We are not sponsored by the makers of this plugin nor are there any affiliate links
For an ecommerce site, customizing and configurating a product LIVE on the screen in front of your customer is certainly a difficult method to beat of keeping your viewer on your page and impressing them.
For conversion rate optimization alone I would be thinking about installing this.
What is a product configurator?
It is the perfect procrastination tool for someone to open their phone and start playing with the product options again so they can talk themselves round to clicking “add to cart”.
A configurator is a facility on your website where a product – say for example: a sofa, is on the screen but there are various options to choose from for the same style of sofa. We will call this particular sofa “dionysus” for talk sake.
So instead of having green/red/blue/black as four different products like:
Dionysus – Green
Dionysus – Red
Dionysus – Blue
Dionysus – Black
You would instead have
Dionysus
Then there would be something on the listing to suggest there are various options.
So you click Dionysus and you are presented with an interface beside the image, there are options for colours and upon clicking the colours, the sofa changes colour accordingly in real time.
Although you may have realised you don’t need fancy software for that, so what’s the configurator for?
The configurator comes in when certain elements need to be changed in real time whilst the main product stays the same.
So for example, you may have options for changing particular parts of the sofa. You may have cushion 1/2/3 each with their own colour options and then the base of the sofa itself.
A real life example would be dbrand.com with their skin configurator but it is a very basic example of a configurator.
What can be configured?
Depending on how effective the plugin obviously, you can get a lot. For example with WP configurator lite you can edit all the colours you can edit with basic photo editing. So colour options for different parts of the product are basically the limit for the free version WP configurator lite
What about WP configurator PRO?
So this is particularly niche, but you can choose parts of the product to have custom pictures, text and conditional logic(if you don’t know what this is, just assume you will save yourself headaches by hiring a WordPress developer).
Do I need WP configurator PRO or LITE?
As discussed, it depends purely on whether or not your requirements go beyond the changing of colours.
If you’re having a go at making the website yourself, there are a couple of youtube videos by the makers but it’s limited. It is however far quicker to get the hang of than you might think.
If using this feature, we do insist on giving the client a walk-through of it’s use if they insist on configuring it themselves. Though as part of our monthly care packages we do offer to do all the work ourselves which saves both us and the client a lot of coffee and frustration.
Alternatives
We really don’t see anything that holds it’s own compared to this. For the pro plugin it’s $59 per year which is pittance for what you are getting and it does wonders for your site and your brand. Some competitors have very basic alternatives and they just don’t look as fancy.
Which for ecommerce specifically, is always a bit of a bonus. You want people to stay on your page and be impressed. There is a bit of psychology in there in impressing your customers just a bit more when you want them to trust you with their credit card deets.
This is the site that sells the plugin, you can see some examples
If you would rather just tell us what you want done and let us do the heavy lifting then click here