Brands selling products that can be personalized, monogrammed, or that come in various shapes, sizes, and colors face a unique challenge: their visitors should be able to visualize their creation in the highest possible resolution, and do so quickly.
Failing to provide a confidence-building visual leads to dissatisfied shoppers who purchase merchandise that didn’t come as expected. This leads to higher return rates which eat into profits. What’s worse, in the case of monogrammed or custom lettering products, the returns can’t be resold. After all, who wants returned custom-printed family reunion t-shirts?
Instead, shoppers want on-demand, personalized experiences. They want to visualize the finished product. That’s why making the customer experience as customizable as possible is crucial for these ecommerce sites.
This blog covers the challenges that brands face when it comes to customization and how automation can help.
As brands include more options for each product, it’s crucial that users can see images or videos of each variation. However, creating and delivering variations on-the-fly is not easy. Oftentimes the altered versions are inaccurate or poor-resolution previews. Post-purchase, these inaccuracies and distortions lead to dissatisfied users who are more likely to return items.
One brand excelling at creating high-quality product variants quickly is Custom Ink. The site is a popular destination for families, schools, and teams to find and design distinctive t-shirts and branded items. Since its inception in 1999, the company had been using an on-prem DAM solution. Over the course of two-plus decades, it estimates it amassed hundreds of thousands of visual media assets. Naturally, there came a point when their DAM became too unwieldy for its creative and marketing teams to manage.
To solve these challenges, the company switched to the SaaS-based Cloudinary DAM in order to:
- Streamline management of hundreds of thousands of images to improve user experience.
- Seamlessly integrate with existing Google and Adobe-based workflows to accelerate and automate media processing and editing.
- Easily add their own branding to videos to create customized video experiences that keep visitors on their site longer.
These advantages point to why brands with customization options need to create product variants programmatically by using automated technology solutions.
Creating all possible product variations is cost and resource extensive. This is particularly the case for online stores that allow users to upload their own graphics to create an item.
Showcasing personalized products can lead to several problems, including but not limited to, an inconsistent look and feel across the same visual assets in different parts of a site and slower time-to-market. Inaccurate portrayal of product variations also leads to a decrease in user relevance as visitors will disregard a site with poor user experience the next time they are in the market for the product.
This level and scale of customization of media assets may sound daunting, but it’s actually simple when technology that automates these processes is implemented.
Take for instance Minted. Its catalog consists largely of art from independent artists that shoppers can browse then configure and customize with a variety of different options and attributes. Any given piece of art on Minted can have more than 100,000 variants. By using Cloudinary, the site has been able to:
- Generate 60 million complex images programmatically across 4,000 art products in its crowd-sourced platform.
- Launch new art products in hours, versus weeks, by replacing an internal 2D/3D system the company outgrew.
Cloudinary helps increase conversions and reduce returns with accurate, on-demand, and high-definition previews of personalized products at scale, all while reducing the time and overhead required from merchandising, production, and engineering by supporting tasks such as:
- Media customization
- Conditional transformations
- PSD layers
- Customized video experiences
Contact us today to see how Cloudinary can transform your ecommerce store and deliver customized experiences and product variants programmatically.
