3 Reasons Why Mass Customization Technology is Made Cheaper and Easier
What were the main faults that characterized customization technology before it vanished into history following the arrival of mass production? This is an important question to answer when considering the success mass customization is showing in the current ecommerce industry.
And it seems old-fashioned customization’s failure to survive in the 20th century consumerism culture is made clear by 3 major deal-breaker issues:
- It was expensive
- It came in limited quantity
- And it was hard to standardize
The modern ability to manufacture large quantities of cheap products considerably fast, saved time, money and effort, and it came to be the main profitable channel of commerce. As a consequence, customized boutique products became a luxury for the rich and famous, but otherwise completely unaffordable.
So what’s changed?
In a word- everything. The world has been transformed almost immediately with the arrival of the digital revolution, making everything accessible, faster and cheaper. But more importantly, the consumers themselves have changed. The market has become so overwhelmingly competitive, that consumers were made to understand they could have almost anything they wanted with the touch of their hand. This consumerist realization has brought back customization big time, but with a few drastic changes-
And along came the right technology…
We have arrived to a time where customizing your products is no longer a “good to have” option on your website, but a “must have”, if you want to satisfy today’s consumers. And this was enabled by a mature technology that is available today for almost any ecommerce platform, making customizing your brand a cheaper and easier process than ever, and here’s why-
To speak to someone about customization click here.
3 reasons why customization is cheaper and easier today
- User tracking tools. Today, cookies and user behavior tracking algorithms allow Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to suit the content they display for the user’s unique browsing habits; well, the same technology is used on ecommerce websites to offer the best product customization features, based on purchase history, profile data, etc. This automated process requires zero effort, and creates the ultimate personalized user experience.
- Easy maintenance & integration. A good customization SaaS today is easy to maintain and integrate. It is no longer a matter of a dedicated configurator built from scratch for each project individually, but a stable platform that allows web developers to build complex visual product configurators with standards-based protocols (such as XML, HTML, etc). Needless to say, this has major implications on time and money spent.
- The new consumers. Consumers today are in fact users. And to be even more accurate, most of the digital consumers are today referred to as the “Millennials”, best described as aged between 19 and 38 in 2014. They’re more educated than previous generations, they grew up with the internet as being their main source of information and communication, and they are literally “digital natives”. This new target audience for consumerism is in essence the cultural effect of the digital revolution. It has 1 clear, uncompromising demand from the retailers: they are willing to pay for exactly what they want, however they want it. Simple as that. Hard to say whether technology here is the chicken or the egg, but in any case, both have enabled today’s mass customization.
So there you have it
To answer our initial question, mass customization works today because it was successful in eliminating the 3 main reasons for its failure in the 20th century- it is no longer expensive, limited in quantity or hard to standardize. On the contrary, today’s technology makes the process of manufacturing and selling much more cost effective by producing exactly what the consumer wants in more accurate quantities, without being left with huge amounts of extra stocks, while also making it easy to standardize, based on consumers’ habits’ tracking tools.
And so, from a “good to have” to a “must have”, mass customization is the leading consumerism experience today, and probably will continue to be, for the next few generations to come.
To speak to someone about customization click here.
