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Have you planned to sell custom products online but don't know how?
The demand for customization is skyrocketing, with 91% of consumers more likely to pay for brands that offer relevant values to themselves. This surge is also a golden chance for businesses to sell personalized items online and make their brands stand out.
If so, what should you do now?
It’s best to start learning how to sell custom products online. You can have crucial skills to identify the market, utilize assistance tools, research products, and manage budgets. Below is a step-by-step guide to help kickstart online sales across platforms effectively.
Niche Selection and Product Validation
The right market and product are always key to selling custom products online. Otherwise, you’re likely to lose market opportunities and not drive buyer engagement. Let’s optimize this demand by a well-defined niche selection and product validation.
Identify a Profitable Niche
What is a “profitable” niche? It is not easy to answer; you need to do more to identify it. Choosing a proper market will ensure consistent customer interest, the potential for long-term growth, and head-to-head competition in such a dynamic market today.
Here are the best tactics to consider for this step:
- Market research
Understanding customers’ demands is crucial for building and designing your products. That’s why you need to conduct in-depth research for a comprehensive evaluation. Google Trends and social media analytics are all powerful tools for this demand.
Sellers should have in-depth market research before selling custom products online
- Competitor analysis
You need to research both direct and indirect competitors in your product niche. Then, have detailed analytics about their performance, from product and pricing to marketing. This is effective in finding a gap to differentiate your business and deliver unique values.
- Trendspotting
Stay on top of industry trends! Google Trends, Pinterest, TikTok, and Instagram can inspire numerous emerging interests, making it easier to sell custom products online. Sustainable or eco-friendly custom products are trending in various niches. You can also learn more about the upcoming trends from local trade shows and conferences.
Some trending niches of custom products are below:
B2C Consumer Products
- Apparel: T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies;
- Accessories: stickers, tote bags, phone cases;
- Home & living goods: wall art, mugs;
Furniture & Manufacturing products
- Furniture: sofa, table, shelvings, cabinets;
- Kitchen & bath: bespoken indoor and outdoor kitchens are trending;
- Construction: sauna, phone booth, modular houses;
- Machinery and equipment: woodworking machines and spray painting system;
Pinterest constantly updates the newest custom product trends worldwide
- Identifying underserved markets
It’s not enough to look only at the current audience. Don’t ignore targeting underserved markets—they’re individuals whose needs are not fully met by existing products. Thus, if you become one of the leaders, it’s an ideal idea to capitalize on your business.
Validating Your Product Idea
This step ensures actual demand and reduces risks before launching on the market.
Start with surveys to gather insights about customer preferences. After that, offer pre-orders to measure interest and secure upfront revenue. You can also launch a minimum viable product (MVP), then gather feedback and refine your offering if needed.
Selecting the Best Platform to Sell Custom Products
Choosing the proper platform is crucial for reaching your target audience, building your brand, and maximizing sales. Below are the 3 best ways to sell custom products online:
Build your own eCommerce stores
When you own an eCommerce store, you can have full control over your sales process. You can either build everything from scratch yourself or use eCommerce platforms.
Shopify is one of the leading eCommerce platforms to sell customized products online
WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento are the leading eCommerce platforms today. They offer robust features for creating a professional-looking storefront, controlling sales and logistics (e.g., shipping and packaging), performing marketing optimization, and working with payment processors. Notably, you can also have integration with third-party eCommerce plugins to extend your eCommerce store’s functionality for specific needs,
Selling on Marketplaces
If you want to reach a large, built-in audience of shoppers, Amazon, Esty, or eBay are the best platforms to sell customized consumer products. They’re the go-to choice for beginners because they don’t require much heavy lifting from scratch. You only need to create a seller account, list products, add descriptions, establish prices, and start selling.
However, while these marketplaces work well for small consumer items, they may not be the best option for bespoke products like furniture, machinery, or construction materials. These products often demand visualization tools like 3D product configurators, which marketplaces lack, helping customers visualize all product angles clearly and accurately.
Selling via Facebook Shops, Instagram Shopping, and Tiktok Shop
These channels allow for some basic levels of product personalization that are relevant to your target audience’s demands before you display and sell custom products online. Tailored options can engage customers, build their interest, and lead to faster decisions.
TikTok Shop is an emerging platform attracting lots of attention from customers worldwide
Indeed, these channels are popular for simple, customized products like T-shirts, mugs, and so on. That said, for complex or more structured items like furniture, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok don’t have visualization tools to help simplify the sales process.
Creating a Seamless Customization Experience
Selling modular and highly customizable products comes with its own set of challenges. It’s difficult to showcase all possible product variants and combinations using just 2D photos or static visuals, and customers can not fully visualize their customization options. This might lead to confusion, a lengthy buying process, and risks of errors and returns.
Understand that the next step in our guide on how to sell customized products is to ensure a smooth customization experience. Let’s take a look at the three following ideas:
Visual Product Configurators
Visual product configurators can strongly support businesses that sell bespoke products. They provide immersive visuals and allow customers to customize their own designs. With 3D configurators like VividWorks, customers can easily explore all their chosen variants and combinations and then build and design products without sales assistance. This ensures greater clarity about the custom design they are actively interacting with, boosting their confidence and trust to make the purchase at the final checkout step.
Here is what makes 3D configurators one of the best tools for customizing products:
- Real-time 3D visualization and configuration
Shoppers can configure their own custom products and see all the changes they make in real time. These 3D product configurators also help customers adjust the dimensions of products effectively—they are especially important for complex products like furniture. This will create an engaging, informative, and immersive customer shopping experience.
- CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
The configurator leverages sales automation with visual CPQ—it integrates visualization, pricing, and quoting processes into an all-in-one platform. Both you and your customers can interact with 3D visualizations and then get accurate, respective prices and quotes.
- Dynamic pricing
Dynamic/real-time pricing is how the configurator automatically adjusts prices based on each customization and combination. This ensures accurate and up-to-date costs, minimizing time and error from manually calculating or forth-and-back communications.
- Precise measurements
The 3D product configurator ensures accuracy in every customization with real-time updating 3D model measurements. It is especially effective in increasing customer trust, reducing errors in the ordering step, and, finally, encouraging customers to close deals.
- Seamless integration
You can integrate 3D product configurators into your eCommerce platform like Shopify, Magento, and WordPress (WooCommerce), to make your sales process even smoother. These visual configurators can also work well with CRM or ERP to enable automated workflows, Bill of Materials (BOMs), SKUs, print-ready files, assembly instructions, etc.
- AR and animations
Augmented Reality (AR) can make CPQ more effective and efficient than ever before. Customers can visualize their customized products in their own environment, seeing clearly what they’re getting before they buy and reducing their confusion. AR also provides valuable data insights for tracking customer interactions and preferences.
Grand + Benedicts is one of the most successful use cases of 3D Configurators to transform the sales process. The configurator allows customers to design their own shelving systems and ensures instant and accurate quotes. This helps the company improve its performance, ranging from sales cycles to increased customer satisfaction.
Easy-to-Use Customization Tools
Alternative methods, like drop-down menus, text input fields, or image uploads, can be used for static visuals on simple products. Whatever you decide on, ensure clear, detailed instructions and a user-friendly interface, which is crucial to minimizing frustration with each personal touch, leading to improved user experience.
Product Previews and Mockups
For dynamic product previews, instant visual cues can be provided to reflect customers' adjustments in color, text, or design choices. You can prefer using augmented reality (AR) while adopting these product previews to elevate the user experience in the real world.
Otherwise, high-quality mockups make your brand more professional and trustworthy. You can generate them automatically, ensuring that customers receive an accurate visualization of their custom products before finalizing their orders in your store.
Marketing Strategies to Sell Custom Products
If you want to sell custom products online successfully, don’t ignore the role of a well-rounded marketing strategy. Below are the 4 key tactics that you should adopt:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Implementing SEO for custom product websites is crucial for increasing organic traffic and improving your site’s visibility on search engines. Focus on keyword optimization, high-quality content and images, page speed, and product page optimization tactics.
- Social Media Marketing
Meta and Pinterest are powerful social media outlets to present your custom products. It’s also essential to use niche advertising to target your ad to a specific demographic. Don’t forget to test with various types of content (e.g., customer testimonials) to make your brand more trustworthy and encourage shares, creating a larger audience.
- Influencer & Affiliate Marketing
Influencer creates real content around your products or services, and affiliate marketing brings traffic via blogs and social. This method gives your approach more credibility and delivers it directly to the ears of future customers caught through authentic channels.
- Email Marketing & Retargeting
Email campaigns and retarget ads are must-haves to come back with those past visitors. You should issue tailored offers, follow-ups for pending customizations, and prods on fresh products. Besides that, running retargeting ads on Google and Facebook can make consumers remember your brand, which will drive higher chances of the next purchase.
Conclusion: The Future of Customization
Entering the world of customization offers startups endless opportunities to succeed. This is because personalization products are in high demand, and the brands that act now will reap the rewards from the market. However, businesses that sell custom products online need to follow a step-by-step guide to perform the best sales results.
Try a demo to discover how VividWorks 3D Product Configurator can level up your store. Don’t forget to book a free consultation to get useful advice from our experts.
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Streamline your process today!
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