Introducing Product Lab - an eCommerce solution that integrates ShapeDiver into WooCommerce and Shopify online stores

Dear grasshopper professionals and enthusiasts,

It is my pleasure to present to you our eCommerce solution - Product Lab. It is a plugin that allows you to embed any ShapeDiver model into a WooCommerce or Shopify online store. The application has a great set of features that satisfy the most common scenarios. It is stable and ready for production use.

At the moment, we are still setting up some of our operations, but we are ready to give early access to anyone who is interested. Also, we have a lot of plans for the future and we will need your help in order to move forward. I believe that with your support we can build something really useful.

I have to say that I am really impressed by the creativity and the ingenuity of this community. That is why, there will always be a free version of this application for people who are just starting out and want to test their idea. I hope that this tool will open many opportunities for you and will help you build amazing products and innovative business models.

I truly believe that together we can build a lot of great stuff.

Sincerely,
Ventsislav Buhlev
Founder & Software Engineer
New Branch Ltd

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WooCommerce Video
Shopify Video

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Hi Ventsislav, Product Lab looks like an amazing tool to enhance the user interface of any 3D product configurator on e-commerce sites. Is it possible to integrate it with a product store based on a Wix website?

Best regards,

Hi Fernando,

We do not have experience with the WIX API and I can not tell for sure if it is possible or not. My guess is that it is possible but difficult to do, mostly because WIX is a closed source platform similar to Shopify. Just to have an idea, implementing the plugin for WooCommerce was roughly 2-3 times easier than for Shopify.

The reason why we decided to have a version for Shopify is because it is very popular. Together with WooCommerce, they account for roughly 50% of the market share. They are mature, stable, feature rich and have big communities. Also there are a lot of experts and third party applications you can choose from, which is very important in my opinion.

That being said, we want to invest more effort into new features and tools that can help you grow your business, instead of supporting other platforms.

So how to decide what to do ?

If you are just starting out, I would recommend using WooCommerce. I think that it is the best platform for these kinds of customizable products and it gives a lot of opportunities for automation. We really like it so far.

If you have an established business, then you will have to think about what is more economically feasible - migrating your online store to another platform or paying for custom software development. The second is expensive and risky, but sometimes it makes more sense. We can help you both ways.

I hope this is useful.

Cheers,
Ventsi

Hi Ventsi,

Thanks for the quick response. I had no idea about the complexity of programming for one platform vs another one. We chose Wix due to the fact that we are starting small and it has less overhead expenses and sales fees. Nonetheless, we do want to have a great customer experience and we are just about to speak with a couple web developers. We’ll definitively analyze whats less expensive, to hire a web developer to achieve a great user interface or just switch platforms.

Thanks again.

Best regards,

Fernando

Right now it is a bit difficult to objectively compare different platforms for use with ShapeDiver, so it will be great if you can share your findings and keep us updated. Good luck!

Hello everybody,

A quick update on the project.

We have created a landing page for the project where you can find relevant and up to date information.
There you can register in our application and download the WooCommerce plugin for free. The application allows you to manage your subscription and gives you some basic usage statistics.

A lot of people were interested only about our user interface features and the admin to manage it. Because of them, we are working on a solution that will allow you to embed this interface in an arbitrary web page, but without the eCommerce integration.

Cheers,
Ventsislav Buhlev

Product Lab