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March 26, 2024

3D Product Visualization: A Strategic Investment for Industrial Distributors?

Exploring 3D Product Visualization Investments

As an industrial distributor, you are at the mercy of price fluctuations, demand and supply shocks, and constant competition. The time is now to act and invest in 3D product visualization software. By implementing 3D product visualization, you optimize your sales operations, streamline workflows, and enhance customer service efficiency across your eCommerce portal.   

In this article, we will discuss the potential of product visualization for industrial distributors and answer the questions below.

  1. What is Product Visualization?
  2. Why Product Visualization Matters in Industrial Distribution?
  3. What Advantages Does 3D Product Visualization Software Offer to Maintenance, Repairs, and Operations (MRO) Distributors?
  4. Use Cases for 3D Visualization in Your Distributor Business
  5. How Product Visualizations Can Profit Your Distributor Business.

Download the eBook: How to Boost Sales with 3D Visualization in Manufacturing.

What is Product Visualization?

Product visualization uses visualization software to view and manipulate 3D models. Product visualization is generated using computer-aided design (CAD) assets. It is a part of product lifecycle management.

Product visualization is a powerful tool for e-commerce product photography. It creates photorealistic images of configurable products before they are manufactured or ordered via e-commerce portals.

This supports functions ranging from design and styling to sales and marketing. Product visualization comes in various digital content formats like 3D CAD models, 360-spin images, and Artificial Reality interactions. These digital assets could live in the pre-and-post-sales transaction process.

 

Why Product Visualization Matters in Industrial Distribution?

Industrial distributors buy in bulk at discounted prices and sell to retailers for a higher price. This means that their profit margins are dependent on price fluctuations.

Industrial distributors must handle volumes of product categories to make a profit. This helps to spread risk among other product portfolios. Their product categories often change based on demand and supply patterns.

With the frequent changes in consumer buying behavior comes the need to update product catalogs. This means that distributors need to update their product catalogs often. Where their products involve thousands of SKUs (Store Keeping Units), you can only imagine how much that will require to update them.

Opting to do product photography is not a quick and effortless process either. This is a laborious and painful process that requires a big marketing department. It is impossible to embark on this adventure with every product update.

Why 3D Visualization?

By embracing 3D product visualization, e-commerce businesses can provide an immersive and informative shopping journey for their customers. This builds trust and credibility with their customers.

The future of the industrial distribution sales process is shifting to an always-on approach. The explosion of e-commerce sales is making hardcover product catalogs obsolete. It is no longer enough to design solely a hardcover product catalog and hope that it drives repeated business. Product visualization is a must-have for distributor businesses.

Customers’ shopping habits, needs, and preferences have shifted. Online purchases are quickly taking over brick-and-mortar channels. Moreover, consumers want an immersive experience that is intuitive, interactive, and realistic to build confidence in their online purchases.

 

What Advantages Does 3D Product Visualization Software Offer to Distributors?

3D product visualization offers distributors an avenue to highlight their products in an interactive and immersive way.

This is necessary because of the precision and complexity of the type of products that they carry. Customers need to examine the details of the products in a sandbox environment. Leveraging a 360-degree spin, zoom in and out, feature on your e-commerce platform keeps your customers engaged. By implementing effective product visualization, you gain a competitive edge, enhance efficiency and confidence, and maximize profits.

  1. Empower Your Customers to Search, Find, and Buy

One of the key advantages of 3D visualization is the significant enhancement in operational efficiency. By streamlining and optimizing your e-commerce site with product visualization, you improve the checkout efficiency, and decrease your shopping cart abandonment rate, while also increasing customer satisfaction.

For example, through enhanced 3D visualization of products, your online customers have a visual feel of your product. This can increase conversion lift on your e-commerce site, build a better business reputation, and align the design of configurable products across teams. Empower your customers to easily search, find, and buy with image search.

  1. Work from a Single Source of Truth

Achieve the ‘design-win’ by having enabling part numbers locked into the bill of materials (BOM). Having a common source of truth to work from is a win. Your customers can easily and quickly make updates, and this will be reflected in the design in real time. This takes away the guesswork and confusion from your order processes.

 

Use Cases for 3D Visualization in Your Distributor Business

3D product visualization enables you to incorporate existing CAD assets to generate 3D visualizations for your e-commerce sites. This process does not require an expert level of knowledge to build.

It is a click-and-generate process with a minimal amount of work. This saves your business a lot of time, effort, and money in conducting product updates. Some use cases that you can employ right now in your digital strategy are:

  1. eCommerce Aftermarket

eCommerce Aftermarket helps users to search by their product’s serial number conveniently. It also enables navigation by assembly to sub-assembly for spare part identification and purchase. 3D product visualization leverages incredible precision and details to highlight the features of your product. Transform the shopping cart experience by offering:

  1. Bill of material (BOM) spare part identification and selection based on the serial number provided.
  2. Interactive 3D spare part identification and selection based on the serial number provided.

  1. Guided Selling

Guided selling empowers your online buyers to easily search, find, and buy via your eCommerce site via image search. Guided selling is cost-effective and easily implementable while offering keyword search with integrated 3D visualization, CAD, and more. Businesses with multiple product SKUs can leverage this solution to provide personalized product recommendations for their customers.

  1. 3D Catalog

With 3D Product Catalog, your customers can customize their product designs on the fly. Specify product categories for your target audience in their new engineering designs. Serve your customers with enhanced product downloads in 2D and 3D formats for configured products.

  1. Data Syndication

Data syndication provides your distribution partners with rich product information delivered via a PIM-optimized data feed. This includes product specifications, attributes, descriptions, keywords, accessories, pricing, availability, taxonomy, and digital assets that include images, CAD, drawings, and augmented reality.

Explore our Self-Guided Demo Motor by CDS Visual to have a feel of 3D product visualization.

 

How Product Visualizations Can Profit Your Distributors

 

Driving repeated online sales requires a lot of marketing effort to drive prospective buyers to your online portal. By building frictionless online buying with 3D product visualization, you can build repeatable sales and reputation. Product visualization enables your customers to have an immersive experience of their products leading to completed sales.

  1. Interactive Buying Experience

Is the creation of an interactive digital buying experience a win for your distributor business? Where your business sells products that require an interactive buying experience to support your higher consideration/high complexity products, leveraging 3D visualization is a win. Big ticket items like engineered products to mission-critical products, by leveraging your existing CAD assets to your customer journey, your business turns to have a positive business outcome. Interactivity via 3D viewer and CAD assets supports a higher buyer consideration by helping your customers understand, select, and buy your product faster. By turning your CAD assets into 3D product visualization, you empower your customers to buy with confidence.

  1. Enhanced Content

Whether you want to test the impact of enhanced content on conversion lift, 3D Visual Ecommerce is the perfect solution for your business. As your customers have exhibited an interest in the benefit that enhanced digital content will have on the sales cycle, it is a no-brainer to get started right away.

Digitizing your complete standard parts catalog allows your customers to interact with your products on your e-commerce site. Encourage your customers to engage with your shopping catalog by providing a photorealistic image of your products. Leverage existing CAD models to create realistic images that build trust, confidence, and business reputation. Increase your onsite conversion rates by 22% when you show realistic images of your products.

Unlocking the Full Potential of CAD Content

 

CAD assets are not new. However, it often resides with the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) engineering team or PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) software. Sales and marketing, through no fault of theirs, do not leverage the advantages of CAD in their marketing promotions.

Distributors using a platform that synergizes sales, marketing, and customer experience stand at the precipice of a highly progressive approach to manufacturing sales.

It is time to start looking at your own distributor business from a customer perspective. It is already an unpleasant experience to go in search of parts for maintenance, repairs, and operations. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Learn how to get ahead of your competition with 3D Visual E-commerce. Build a quick and easy checkout process for your customers to elevate your conversion rate. Our visual e-commerce enhancement software turns CAD drawings into 3D interactive visuals for your website. Contact us to learn more.

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About the author

Winfred Amoako

CDS Visual
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