Knowledge base · from our own projects
Digital product presentation
Digital product presentation is everything a customer sees online before buying, imagery, 3D, video and interaction. For standard products photography is enough. As soon as a product has variants, customisation or invisible properties, a 3D-driven presentation wins, because you can show every version without physically building it.
A product page is a sales conversation without a salesperson. Everything the customer cannot see, they have to imagine, and that is exactly where doubt starts. On products with many variants, photography is a brake. You cannot photograph every version.
The heart of the trade-off
Photography costs per version. 3D costs once per model and after that almost nothing per variant. Where the tipping point lies depends on the number of variants and on how often your range changes.
Work it out simply. Five products in four colours and three sizes are sixty versions. Photographically that is sixty times setting up, lighting and retouching, and with every new colour it starts again. From 3D it is five models and then a list of variants the machine works through, including the sixtieth, including next year.
Four formats, and what each one is for
The product photo remains the cheapest route for a small, stable range that looks exactly like that in real life. As long as that holds, there is no reason to do anything else.
3D imagery wins the moment a version does not exist yet, is hard to photograph, or changes too often. Camera, light and material are fixed, so the hundredth variant has the same look as the first. Photography cannot match that once several sessions are involved.
Video and 360 degrees help with products whose workings or scale are not clear from a single image, moving parts, the inside, or something people misjudge the size of.
A configurator is the only format in which the customer chooses for themselves and immediately sees what they get. That moves the sales conversation onto the site and takes the errors out of the order, because whatever can be chosen is by definition buildable.
What it delivers, measured
At a footwear brand a 3D presentation delivered 49.3 percent more sales in an A/B test than the same page with product photographs. At a furniture manufacturer one central configurator runs at more than four hundred dealers, each in their own house style and on one shared back end. Those are not model calculations but outcomes at clients.
Where it goes wrong
The most common mistake is starting from the technology instead of from the customer's doubt. Anyone who does not know which question is holding their visitor back builds a beautiful presentation that solves nothing. The second mistake is imagery that does not match the real product. That sells once and costs you returns afterwards.
What you will find here
Per presentation format what it delivers, what it costs and when it is not worth it.