App, platform, or custom: which 3D configurator you actually need

The video above is a collar and a leash. The customer changes the leather, the colour, and the hardware, and sees it. That is a configurator: the screen where someone picks a combination you can actually make, a price appears, and the order reaches the shop or the factory without anyone typing it out again. If it only looks good and then someone copies it into a spreadsheet, it is a video. Not a configurator.

Why it’s so easy to choose wrong

Search “3D configurator” and Google shows you software. Shopify apps at $40 to $100 a month. Platforms with a subscription. Custom projects that, depending on who is selling, run from a few thousand euros to more than thirty. Every page says theirs is the right one.

None of them ask how your product is sold. That is the only question that matters.

Three ways to do it

A shop app. It fits if the product already lives in Shopify or WooCommerce and the customer only picks from options you already have: a colour, an engraving, a pack. The shop calculates the price. The order goes through the usual checkout. You can have it running in weeks. It runs out of road when the exceptions start: a size that isn’t on the list, two parts that can’t go together, a different price for each distributor, or an order the factory cannot build.

A platform. It fits if you sell lots of variants with rules — windows, pergolas, furniture, machines — and you want a quote as a PDF without programming the whole thing. You pay to set it up, then a subscription. It runs out of road when your rules don’t fit their editor, the 3D doesn’t look like your product, or the real data lives in another program and the platform only half reads it.

Built for you. It fits when this is how you sell: a salesperson can’t skip a rule, the price doesn’t live in the shop, you sell to companies as well as on the web, or the order has to land by itself in the system where you manufacture or invoice. It costs more at the start. You don’t pay every month for an engine that isn’t yours, and the screen follows your process.

Four questions, plainly

If all four answers are yes, stay with the app. If two or more are no, the app will get in the way.

• The customer only picks a colour, a material, or an extra from a closed list.
• Your shop already calculates the final price, with no odd formulas and no separate tariff per distributor.
• A wrong order gets fixed by customer support. Nobody has to remake it on the factory floor.
• Sales doesn’t use that same screen to quote a company.

If the honest answer is no, the heavy work isn’t the 3D. It’s writing down what can be combined, where the price comes from, and what the order has to say. The picture sits on top. On the collar in the video, spinning the buckle does nothing if the order doesn’t say size, leather, and hardware.

If you’re looking for someone in Barcelona

You’ll find studios that build the configurator, and companies that sell you theirs. We don’t have a platform to rent out. We come in when the shop, the catalogue, or the system you already use is in place, and the configuration screen has to live there, in Spanish and in English. For real, not as a demo.

What we do

Dual Perspective Digital is a studio in Barcelona. We design that screen for your product and connect it to the catalogue, the prices and, when you need it, the system where you manufacture or invoice. 3D earns its place when it helps someone decide, like the collar changing colour in the video. If orders need sorting, documents need reading, or an internal step has to move on its own, we automate it, and we leave a person in the middle when a mistake is expensive.

First we understand the product. Then there is a prototype you can click. Then we deliver it where you already work, not on a page that breaks at product number forty. The timeline depends on the rules and the connections, not on a fee per user.

If you already have an app and it works, leave it. Write to us when it starts pushing you toward a second system for price, distributors, or the factory.

If you want us to look

Tell us what you sell, where the catalogue lives today, and whether the end result has to be a cart, a quote, or an order to the factory. We reply within a business day.

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