A T-shirt in five sizes and three colours – that is what shop systems are built for. Every combination becomes its own product with its own SKU, price and stock. With fifteen variants, that works well.
But many products look different.
When variants explode
Take a made-to-measure blind. A simple example calculation:
| Attribute | Options |
|---|---|
| Width (in 5 cm steps) | 30 |
| Height (in 5 cm steps) | 25 |
| Fabric and colour | 60 |
| Operation | 4 |
That makes 180,000 possible variants – for a single product. Add mounting type, accessories and special requests. As individual products, this can be neither created nor maintained, and the shop would slow down.
Then there are dependencies: a fabric is only available up to a certain width, a motor control only above a minimum size, certain colours only with certain profiles. A classic variant product knows nothing about such rules – so impossible orders reach you and have to be sorted out by hand.
A configurator thinks in rules, not products
A product configurator turns the principle around. Instead of creating every combination as a product, you describe the product by its attributes and the rules that apply between them:
- Attributes and values: sizes, materials, colours, options – as input fields, dropdowns or image tiles.
- Rules: whatever doesn't fit is hidden, preselected or flagged with a hint. Customers can't even order impossible combinations.
- Prices: surcharges per option, formulas or price matrices – for example the manufacturer's price table by width and height.
- Visualisation: product images from combined image layers or a 3D view show the configured product in real time.
Customers put together their product themselves, always see image and price – and the finished configuration lands in the cart and the order with all details.
How we implement this with configento
configento is the cloud-based product configurator we develop at justSelling. Because it runs independently of the shop system, it can be integrated into Magento, Shopware, Shopify, PrestaShop or any website – and connected to ERP, CRM or the quoting process via the configento API.
From our projects:
- Sun protection: blinds, pleated blinds and roller blinds made to measure – with real-time pricing and orders going straight to production. Read more
- Carports and garages: a configurator for every product in a multishop with more than ten domains. Read more
- Licence plates: customers put together their licence plate themselves, and the order goes to SAP automatically. Read more
- Print and mailings: the price is calculated from run, format and services. Read more
- B2B sales: field sales configure trailers, calculate costs and create PDF quotes. Read more
Building and maintaining configurators with AI
Complex configurators have many attributes, rules and prices – and they change. In configento, this can be done with AI, directly in the admin or from an AI assistant such as Claude: create a configurator from a product description, define rules via chat, change prices or translate texts.
One principle applies: all changes go to a draft first. You see what changes, and only what you approve goes live. AI speeds up the work – you stay in control.
When is a configurator worth it?
A configurator is the right choice if at least one of these applies:
- Your products are made to measure or individually assembled.
- There are too many combinations to maintain as variants.
- There are dependencies between options that lead to wrong orders.
- The price comes from tables or formulas rather than a fixed list.
- Your sales team should use the same logic in customer meetings as the shop.
Do you have a product that can't be mapped this way? Get in touch – we'll show you what it could look like in a configurator.