If you have an online business and if you deal with consumer goods, then there is one trend that is penetrating your customer market rapidly and will be in the top 3 trends that would shape the future of your industry! That trend is the trend of product personalization or customized products.
The Customized and Personalized Product Market:
Whether it is apparels or accessories like customized t-shirts or sneakers or whether it is customized cars or furniture, people love when their vision is shaped into customized products and many of these items are also considered as luxury items that are charged a premium. Apart from that, there also has been a raging trend of personalized products as gifts such as pillows, mugs, pens, cards, awards and lots of other such products. Especially during the festive season or personal celebrations, people love to carry personalized gifts.
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While the business is booming and it is being adopted by a lot of businesses with the use of on-demand or just in time business models, the personalized and customized products industry is more diverse than any other industry and the customer expectations are much higher and specific. So, if you are planning to commence a personalized products business, irrespective of which industry or product lines that you wish to offer, below are the 4 major challenges that you will face and you must make a feasible strategy for all these challenges to make your business sustainable and profitable.
4 Major Challenges of commencing a Customized Product Business
1. Choosing an ideal Product Configurator Tool:
Whether you wish to provide products with customizations or with personalization options, one of the most essential things you will need is a product configurator tool. This tool will allow your customers to design their products virtually. Thus, when we talk about the success of your personalized and customized product business, it all boils down to the efficiency of your product configuration software.
To ensure that your tool serves a delightful and satisfactory user experience, it is essential to choose an ideal product configuration software that aligns with your product offerings, your business goals and most importantly your customer expectations. To overcome this challenge, your product configurator solution must have the following features:
- Optimum Customization and personalization options:
Ensure that you cover all the possible customizations such as color, text, shape, size, image, clip art and other such customization options that are relevant to your products.
- Completely dynamic solution:
Make sure that your tool allows you to make changes in all the modules that it has to stay updated with the market expectations.
- 3D product display:
Ensure that your customers get a 360° view of the product from all possible angles and that too in 3D.
- Seamless transition:
Whenever a customer jumps from your website to your 3D product configurator tool, ensure that the transition is seamless and that the experience is uniform in terms of user interface.
- Responsive tool:
To make certain that you get optimum returns from your product configurator tool, get a tool that works on all kinds of devices and screen sizes.
2. Pricing decisions:
One of the major decisions that you have to make is how to monetize your business model. While the majority of businesses charge customers based on the customization they choose, many also charge a subscription fee for rendering the tool for designing. Some also use the product configurator tool as a service and allow different designers and printers to use the tool. In such a model the tool owner takes a commission from each sale or renders the tool on a certain software rental fee. Do some research in the market as to which business model suits the best for your industry and based on your target audience, prepare a personalized pricing policy.
3. Execution quality:
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face is the backlash from the market when their customized product does not match the virtual design created with the product configurator tool. This failure will not only result in unsatisfactory customer experience, but it might increase negative reviews and ultimately damage the brand image. Thus, make sure you use the best quality products and ensure that your customized product execution matches the virtual 3D design.
4. Product Journey and timeline:
While your competitors can get a product configurator tool with the same specifications as yours, they will not be able to match your execution quality, your product execution timeline and your supply chain management finesse. Thus, to create a competitive edge in the market, it is essential that you have the best of all the above-mentioned things and also ensures that you keep evolving the business processes and make them more and more customer-centric.
Wrapping up:
While these challenges are perpetual across all industries, when you find unique and personalized solutions to these challenges, you will be able to manage your business better and create a competitive edge in the market. Also, create an innovation center and good digital marketing strategies to stay ahead in the market.
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