Luxury product pages: when 3D hurts the brand

Luxury buyers take their time

A luxury buyer thinks longer before ordering. Contentsquare puts the luxury conversion rate at 1.4% on desktop and 0.9% on mobile, and explains it by buyers taking longer to decide.

So the page must not push. No countdown, no pop-up after ten seconds, no 'only two left'. I think the page should behave like a good salesperson: present, quiet, ready when asked.

A luxury page waits. It never hurries the buyer.

Speed is part of the impression

The wait is the first thing the buyer sees. In a 2020 study for Google, the agencies 55 and Deloitte found that on luxury sites a 0.1 second faster mobile page went together with 40.1% more users moving from product page to add to basket. The two went together; the study does not prove that one caused the other.

In both of our examples, compressing the file, so it loads faster, took off most of its size.

1. ·An office chair, the file as it came from the 3D artist: 31 megabytes (MB) stored, 21 MB to download. After our compression: 8.9 MB. Same detail, nothing removed.
2. ·A suitcase model we own, built for a demo: 13.4 MB as built, 2.0 MB after compression.

Make the model file smaller before you touch anything else on the page.

Where 3D starts hurting

We made three of these mistakes ourselves. I found them myself on the first version of our suitcase demo. We fixed all three.

Important to note: in my experience the buyer does not blame the software. The buyer blames the Maison.

1. 01A loading screen that is not yours. The first thing on screen was the software's standard loading screen, not our brand.
2. 02A delay after most clicks. Each click waited for the previous movement to finish, plus 200 milliseconds. Now clicks run without waiting in line.
3. 03A view that stayed loose. After a click on a detail marker the model could still be turned freely, away from that detail. Now a click on a marker stops the turning and leaves only zoom.
4. 04A material on screen prettier than the real one. The buyer receives the real leather and compares it to the screen.
5. 05A file bigger than it needs to be. Detail nobody can see on a screen, paid for in seconds of waiting.

A Maison is judged by its worst click, not its best.

What 3D should do instead

The view does the salesperson's job. On the Globe-Trotter custom configurator, live on globe-trotter.com, the view moves to the part the buyer just chose.

We have no number from this client on how it changed sales and we do not claim one. What we can show is what the page does:

1. ·Open the interior, and the case opens.
2. ·Choose the trolley handle, and it extends.
3. ·Add initials, and they appear on the model before payment.
4. ·Share your design as a link. The price and crafting time, three to four weeks, sit under the model.

Every movement on screen answers a choice the buyer just made. Nothing moves on its own.

What to check before launch

What we deliver follows a fixed rule, not a measurement: a model of around 100,000 triangles (the small surfaces a 3D model is built from), material images at most 2048 by 2048 pixels, and the file made smaller by us before it reaches the page.

Five checks, in this order. If one fails, I would put the page live without the model until it passes.

1. 01File size after compression, opened on a phone, on mobile data.
2. 02The first thing on screen is the brand, never the software's standard loading screen.
3. 03Every click answers at once. Nothing waits for a movement to finish.
4. 04The view holds still when the buyer looks at a detail.
5. 05Material on screen matches the material in the box, checked against a physical sample.

When in doubt, less. My rule: a slow model is worse for a Maison than no model.