Aircada ‑ Product Configurator

Leaving a longer review since this was a complex configurator that exceeded expectations. We sell custom cocktail bottles so the label is really the product in a lot of ways. We wanted customers to be able to make their own designs on our Shopify store, but we also needed the orders coming through to be usable on our end. There's not much point having a nice customizer if you still have to chase people for artwork or manually sort everything out after the order comes in.

We used Aircada to piece this all together. Customers design their labels on the bottle in 3D, upload their own artwork, pick their flavors and quantities, and see what they're ordering before they pay. On our side, the different product options, pricing and production files all need to line up with the order, which was probably the part that took the most thought.

But what probably mattered most was being able to build around the way our business actually works instead of having to change our process to fit a generic app. We handled a lot of it ourselves, and when we got into some of the more complicated Shopify logic (ie bundling multiple products into one, discount pricing at specific quantities), the team was always available to help us figure it out. Response times from the team were sometimes within minutes.

Going through this process and coming out the other end has made adding more options and thinking about new products a lot less daunting. We're not starting from scratch every time we want to change something.

The 3D presentation is a nice bonus, especially with the glass bottles and different colored drinks, but for us the real value is that the design customers create has to carry through to an order we can actually make. Aircada gave us a way to manage both sides of that without stitching together a bunch of separate tools. Order comes in, ready-to-print PDF comes out.

If you're selling products that people personalize themselves, I'd say look beyond how the configurator looks in a demo. Think about what happens after checkout, because that's where a lot of the headaches are. That's where Aircada has been useful for us.

We set up Aircada for our custom drinkware bottles recently and it's doing exactly what we need it to do without slowing down the site. We needed a way for customers to see their text and stickers on the 3D bottles in real time, handle multiple languages, and I think the biggest win for us on the backend is the print boundary that's making production much easier to deal with. It's also handling multiple products nicely and wiring them to the cart within the single configurator making ongoing additions and maintenance a lot easier. Visually, it ended up looking about as custom and high end as any shopify apps we've played with. Most look like templates you've seen before. Support has been awesome and we're getting eager to add more bottles to the configurator soon. If you need a customizer that handles dynamic pricing, multiple SKUs, and doesn't look like a cheap template, Aircada takes the cake.

We’re handling ~500 variants and several add-ons with this 3D customizer. Zero complaints. It’s connected to one of our native products and the variants synced up without much hassle to the configurator's custom 3D engraving, logo uploads, and about a dozen custom color option sets. Load time is in the green and I’ve yet see it drop below 60 fps on the phone. All that to say Aircada has done a solid job with both the 3D aspect but even more so integrating it into shopify to not feel like some frankenstein creation we experienced with a few of the other custom apps. And shoutout to the founder brother duo Sean and Wylie. Good dudes.