Challenges of product customization and its solution

We have stated it many times before - as a business, the bulk customization offerings is the future. This improves your customer experience and gives results to busier, loyal users for the beginning. The customization demands are getting enhancements, people who want more products, who are standing, and about 38% of people reported that they seek interest in customized products. 

The businesses that are implementing product customization are getting a new rise every day- however, it consists of some demerits. If this can't take into consideration, then they can convert it from a revenue-generating asset into a catastrophe - about 20% of the printers implementing large scale customizations go down in the first 12 months.

We will discuss the challenges that have come with the product customization for the enterprise owners and ways to handle them:


1. Costly and delicate to implement:
While it may look good in theory, implementing on product optimization eCommerce websites is not the easiest to apply. Imagine keeping the user through the traditional way of gathering the need, building prototypes of the design, and customizing them back and forth. How many users do you think of high speed' will follow through instant gratification era?

A commendable idea is implementing product design software, a platform that allows users to customize the product and order them. But, these devices have their issues - they can sometimes give a lot of options to the user, in which they cannot be interested. Or it can give them lots of options - which will give the choice of closing the users. There may be more hassles on onboarding ads for configuring and using this software.

Also, getting a customization platform designed for your website is usually very expensive. Robust sneaker customizers’ costs' organizations spent thousands of dollars and took several months to grow. You will also take extra costs in case of any change in scale / requirements with maintenance and support cost.

What is the solution? Well, the solution is pretty much simple and straight forward. The enterprise owners have to conduct an in-depth analysis of what is the actual requirement of their business and what are the consumer's expectations in the market. The tool should be developed in such a way that it can cater to all the business needs as well as consumer expectations. This can cut some of the features at the time of development, and can add-on the specific features. The cost will be as specific as your tool's features.

2. Higher manufacturing efficiency:
Establishing and implementing large-scale adaptation strategies varies from very high level to print businesses. Each customized product consists of their designs, and therefore, various types of production logistics will be attached to it.

Being a business, it is not critically impossible to predict or showcase various combinations of mass-products at once. This challenges various aspects of mass customization.

Production time for customized products is different compared to the products produced extensively. The time is taken for replacement of additional factors such as printable formats, changing the printing process into customized designs, changing the printing overhead, etc.' will expand.

3. Demand preparations:
As it is very difficult to predict what user will order in terms of designs, managing the inventory as per that is highly challenging. If demand gets higher than the capacity, you will face inventory lose. Some businesses handle it by stocking additional inventory, but it includes high warehouse costs. This is also the result of being tied in a lot of business capital in inventory.

What is the solution? You can use the "planned bills" for stocking forecasts. They are like regular bills, but rather than listing the actual quantities; they list the percentage of required raw material. These percentages are based on overall "prediction" based on past sequence trends and user behavior. So, invest in those product design software that makes your process of production as efficient as possible.

4. Customer's expectations management:

User will always expect more from business, in the age of heavy discounts, competitive pricing, and same day delivery. When you apply large scale customization, the prices of the product will increase, and delivery timelines will be high. As a result, many users can avoid going through the customization process.

Also, when you create unique products for individual users, the return policy will not be flexible due to obvious reasons. This can scare some users again. Customers are used with an e-commerce business for a non-risk online shopping experience that offers a "no-question-asked" return policy.

What is the solution? Most of the large scale customization challenges are means to; these issues can be resolved by expectations management. Explain in your website and content message that you are providing a premium service with optimization. It will clear out the timelines and pricing.

While integrating custom product configurator, promote transparency by having live previews in the entire personalization process. Also, offer to preview design previews, edit options, and make changes on all stages of the order. You can justify return policy for users by keeping experience in your website and your message, "you get what you see."

Summing up:
In this tech-driven era, just 24% of dedicated customers think that companies must deliver customized products. This is because businesses usually underestimate the problems come because of the customer, and this disappoints their customer.

Implementing mass customization in print eCommerce has its own merits and demerits, like any other enterprises. But, by using correct product customization software, you can transform the process of mass customization into a scalable and profit turning asset.

We at iDesigniBuy, have experienced and skillful developers who dedicatedly work on developing the latest and robust software solutions to cater to the client’s needs as per their business requirements. For more details drop us a mail at info@idesignibuy.com.

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