How to sell bikes online with 3D models and configurators

A bike is hard to sell from a photo. It is expensive, its sizes are given in numbers that few people can picture, and much of what the buyer pays for is bolted on afterwards. Colour also matters more than retailers tend to admit. Bike shops have always dealt with this by inviting the customer in and putting them on a bike.

A website can't do that. Anyone selling bikes or e-bikes online needs to know which of the questions that used to be answered in the shop a 3D model on a product page can answer, and which it can't.

The four questions a bike buyer has

Leaving the browsing aside, a buyer has four questions.

Will it fit me? This covers frame size, standover height, reach and seat height range. It is the question that stops many people before the checkout.

What does it look like? The buyer wants to see the colour under normal light, the shape of the frame from the side and from three quarters, how thick the downtube of an e-bike is with the battery in it, and whether the welds are tidy.

What comes with it, and what do I add? Racks, mudguards, lights, panniers, a child seat or a bigger battery all belong here. On cargo bikes the accessories make up most of the purchase.

Where will it live? Cargo bikes and longtails don't fit in a normal hallway or a normal lift, and people often find this out after delivery.

A 3D model on the page answers the second, third and fourth questions well. It answers the first only in part, and a project should be planned with that limit in mind.

Frame size is the part 3D does not solve

Bike fit depends on the rider's body as much as on the frame. Inseam, torso, arm length, flexibility and riding style all come into it. A 3D viewer can't measure a person, and we don't know of a phone-based body scan that gets a bike fit right. A bike configurator sold on the promise that it ends size returns is being oversold.

3D does make the geometry easier to read. A frame the shopper can rotate, with standover height and seat height range drawn on it as dimension lines, is easier to understand than a geometry table with eighteen rows of millimetres. With a human silhouette of a stated height next to it, the shopper can make the comparison themselves. That is better than a spec table, though it is still no fitting.

The rest of sizing depends on things that have nothing to do with 3D. You need a size chart keyed to rider height, clear inseam guidance, and a returns policy that says what happens if the size is wrong. Do those first.

AR shows whether the bike fits where it will be kept

AR answers the fourth question better than anything else does. Both mobile platforms place a correctly scaled model in a room straight from the browser. Android does it through Scene Viewer, where one unit in the glTF file equals one metre so that the model appears at true size, and iOS does it through AR Quick Look in Safari. The shopper doesn't need to install an app.

For a standard road or hybrid bike this is of some use. For anything long it matters much more. A cargo bike is around two and a half metres long. People buy one and then find that it doesn't turn in their hallway, doesn't fit the bike shed or won't go into the lift. If a shopper can stand in their own hallway and place the bike there before ordering, that kind of return is avoided. Those returns are expensive, because a bike is costly to ship and can come back damaged.

Accessories are the reason to build a configurator

We built a configurator for Livelo, who sell cargo bikes. Frame colour alone would not have justified it. What made it worth building is that a cargo bike involves a long chain of decisions. The buyer picks frame and colour, then the box or the flatbed, then the rain cover, child seats and lighting, and then a battery size that depends on how heavily they plan to load the bike.

On a product page this is a long options table. In a configurator the shopper sees the box, the cover and the seats appear on the bike as each one is chosen.

We won't attach a number to that. We haven't measured it well enough, and we know of no reliable published figure for configurator attach rates. What we can describe is how it works. The accessory is shown in context, on the product it belongs to, while the decision is still open. The related-products row at the bottom of a page does none of those three things.

You can try the same pattern on a different product on our configurator page, where the modules and fabrics of a sofa behave the same way.

What the published figures say, and their limits

There is less published evidence on 3D and AR in e-commerce than the marketing suggests, and none of it is about bikes. The figure quoted most often comes from Shopify, which reported in 2020 that interactions with products carrying 3D or AR content converted 94 percent more often than the same kind of products without. That comes from a comparison across merchant data and was no controlled test. Merchants also tend to model their better products first, so treat it as a direction and don't use it as a forecast.

Shopify published more specific numbers from Rebecca Minkoff and Gunner Kennels. Shoppers were 44 percent more likely to add to cart after interacting in 3D and 27 percent more likely to place an order, AR-enabled pages had a 65 percent purchase lift, and Gunner Kennels cut its return rate by 5 percent. These are other categories at other price points, but they show roughly what kind of effect to expect.

Returns cost a lot of money. The National Retail Federation put United States returns at 743 billion dollars in 2023, 14.5 percent of sales and 17.6 percent online. Bikes are heavy, so a returned bike costs far more to handle than a returned t-shirt.

The order to build things in

Don't start by modelling the entire catalogue. Bikes share frames, wheels and components across a range, so the later models cost much less once the first few exist. You can learn that from three products as well as from forty.

A free model of one bike to test with

If you sell bikes, the quickest way to find out whether this applies to your shop is to put one model live and watch what your customers do with it. We'll build a 3D model of one of your products for free so you can do that, and the model is yours to keep. You can send us one product to start. What else we build, and what it costs, is on solutions and prices.

Sources

• Google, Scene Viewer documentation.
• Apple, AR Quick Look.
• Shopify, merchant data on 3D and AR content, September 2020.
• Shopify, AR shopping: Rebecca Minkoff and Gunner Kennels results.
• National Retail Federation and Appriss Retail, 2023 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry.