It’s a world of choice. From brick-and-mortar stores to shopping malls to subscription boxes to the millions of commercial options available online, consumers expect to be able to find exactly what they want, when they want it.
Unfortunately, if you don’t provide such choice on your own product pages and in your online store, you’re likely to lose the sale to someone who does. That’s what makes personalization options so important in Shopify.
If you’re wondering how to add personalization options on Shopify, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’ll discuss why product personalization is important, the most popular personalization options for Shopify, how to add them step by step with Product Options & Customizer, and how to test your new custom product pages to make sure your customers will love them.
Ready to personalize your shop and see more sales? Keep reading.
Personalization brings several benefits to the ecommerce customer experience. These include:
So how do you get such benefits going in your shop? That comes down to adding more personalization options, which will directly affect the number of product variants on each page.
Unfortunately, this is a problem. Shopify natively limits the number of variants you can use to 100 per product listing. While 100 may seem like a lot, it’s really not. Consider a t-shirt that has five colors, five sizes, and five fabric blend options, for instance. It’s a pretty simple set of parameters, but 5 x 5 x 5 = 125, so you’re over your limit. Instead of having all those options in one post, you have to put them in separate listings.
And while it is technically possible to force these options into a single listing using the Shopify platform alone, it requires embarking on a difficult HTML coding journey to modify your Shopify theme — a task to which most shop owners aren’t suited.
Instead, if you want to encouragecustomers to click that Add To Cartbutton, you need a better way to personalize your listings.
There are multiple product aspects on which you can offer customization in your Shopify store, and numerous combined ways to customize a product. These include dropdown menus, text boxes, color swatches, and more.
Whether you sell home décor, cell phone cases, handmadeearthenware, or anything else, knowing how to customize is the best possibleway to increase sales in your shop. In this section, we’ll take a look at howto add personalization options onShopify in various ways.
Upcharge pricing is a great way to recapture your materials costs. Too long were shop owners forced to eat the cost of additional materials – nicer metals or more intensive decoration, for instance. Nowadays, you can use upcharge pricing options through some third party apps to ensure you never have to do so in your Shopify store again.
With per option upcharge pricing, customers see exactly how much it costs to select upgrade their personalization to the nicer options. Not only does that mean there are no surprises in the shopping cart, but it gives customers a healthy appreciation for the quality of your materials. Oftentimes, that makes them even more willing to buy.
Text fields give your customers a way to enter custom text for you to use in personalizing their items. Perhaps they need engraving on a nice jewelry gift, letterpress invitations, or would simply like to include a gift message for a loved one.
Whatever the case, text boxes let your customers input the exact words they want associated with their order. And when you use a third party app like Product Options & Customizer to collect this information, you don’t have to use one of your three customization options (the native Shopify limit) to do it.
Note that with custom text fields, you don’t set variant options; the customer simply inputs the information themselves.
If you want your customer to pick from a simple list of options, dropdown menus are the way to go. Think the size of a t-shirt (XS, S, M, L, XL, 2XL), for example, or the metal color for a ring (gold, rose gold, silver, platinum, copper, bronze).
Dropdowns are the perfect option when you want the customer to be able to visualize all their choices in one place, but pick only one. It’s visually very clean and doesn’t require that you use different SKUs for different product options.
Radio buttons and checkboxes offer similar functionality to dropdown menus. With radio buttons, that functionality is very similar, since the customer will see a list of options with circles next to them, of which they can only click one. If they try to click another, the choice will change to that one, so they can’t do two at once.
If you want customers to be able to click more than one option, use checkboxes. That way they can select as many options as are applicable. For instance, with gift wrapping, you might have a checklist that allows them to choose gift wrap and ribbon and a handwritten card – perhaps with per option upcharge pricing to reflect your efforts.
Color swatches let allow you, the store owner, to accurately display exact color options for the products you sell. In fact, Product Customizer’s custom color mapping tool ensures those hues as accurate as possible. As a result, your customers can select the specific shade they’re looking for, and feel confident that their custom creation will arrive looking exactly as planned.
Image swatches are similar, allowing your customerto select a pattern or image for the product they’re considering, without youhaving to take hundreds of photos to match the potential product and createindividual product pages for eachversion.
Depending on what product your customer is personalizing, a font picker might be appropriate. When personalizing options such as monograms, embroidery, screen-printing, and more, offering a wide variety of fonts through a font picker is a great way to let shoppers make a product their own.
The font picker through Product Customizer uses Google fonts, a huge library of options representing the latest styles, classic typefaces, and fun in-betweens.
If you’re ready to add personalization options to your shop with Product Customizers, the good news is you can do so easily. It’s equally simple whether you’re adding variants to new products or as add-ons to existing listings.
Best of all, Product Options & Customizer allows you to get around the100-variant rule that naturally limitsany Shopify store owner using theplatform’s native functionality, soyour store can reach its full potential. In the following step-by-step guide, we’ll explain exactly howto add personalization options onShopify.
To use a third-party app like Product Options & Customizer, you need to do things a little differently. Instead of going straight to Products in your Shopify admin, you will instead navigate to Product Customizer in the apps section of your dashboard.
From there, click the Products tab at the top if you’re not taken directly to it, then navigate to the individual product you want to customize. Note this means you must have already created the product using the normal route (from the Product tab of your dashboard’s main menu on the left-hand side). Afterward, you can find it under Product Customizer and add custom product options.
Once you select the Shopify product you want to customize, you will see two choices in tabs across the top. They are:
One thing users love about Product Customizer is that when you’re batch updating listings, you can select more than one product to which to add options. All you have to do is, instead of going inside an individual product, click the checkboxes next to the applicable products in your Products section of the app, then apply the options to as many as you like.
Whether you’ve chosen an existing option or created a new one, you now need to fill in the details. For example, you’d need to add the options for your dropdown menu, whether there are two or fifteen. If you use color or image swatches, you’ll need to upload them now.
Note that while Product Options & Customizer offers ahuge range of functionality, someactions are available only to Pro subscribers, such as per option upcharge pricing. If you can’t find or select anoption in your dashboard, check your subscription.
Once you’ve filled in all the applicable options, click “Create.” Reload the product page to view your updates if you already created it, or use Live Preview to view a page that hasn’t yet gone live. If all appears well and you’ve followed the tutorial correctly, you should see a list of newly customizable products, ready for your shoppers’ approval!
Now it’s time to check how it looks live on your site. That’s the best way to ensure your customizable Shopify products are working as intended.
The last step in upgrading your store’s personalization options involves testing your new custom product pages to ensure a great user experience. Here’s how:
Ideally, you can count on good customer support during this process. Product Options & Customizer provides just that, with a friendly team that is always available in case users need help.
All you have to do to improve your Shopify store is get the right personalization app, and Product Customizer is here to help. Get a free trial on the Shopify app store or use the free option to customize one product for as long as you’d like, and upgrade your shop today.
Wondering about how to add personalization options on Shopify? This postis here to cover the ins and outs of customizing product listings.
