Why You Should Offer 3D CAD File Downloads of Your Product
You know the old saying: “People buy from other people whom they like and trust.” Well, there is a corollary to that: “People buy from other people whose CAD models they love and trust.”
Users, whether they be engineers, architects or interior designers, need to know whether your company’s products are a good fit for their designs. Increasingly, what users are doing is wanting to download a 3-D model from your website, position that model in their larger 3-D model of a machine or architectural project and check for the fit.
Downloadable 3-D models should be provided for a good reason: they make good marketing sense. By playing with your 3-D models, users are subconsciously getting familiar with them and getting to like them. This increases the likelihood of them buying your physical product when their design is done.
An innovation in downloadable 3-D models is for websites to provide what are known as parametric 3-D models. A parametric model is a model whose design is controlled by a list of parameters. The parameters are offered to the user in a table, the user chooses the parameters he/she wants, the model is drawn on the fly and the user downloads it immediately.
There are two variants of parametric model provision: in one variant, the user goes to your website and chooses parameters from a table of parameters on your website. Your website instantaneously creates a 3-D model based on those parameters and makes the 3-D model available for download.
The other variant is a ‘client’ version of the same system. Instead of choosing the parameters at your website, the user downloads the table of parameters and your model creating software into his/her machine. He/she launches the program, is presented with a table of parameters and the 3-D model is created on the user’s machine without the Internet.
Regardless of which variant you provide, the user is made familiar with your product. It is almost as if the user is given a free sample of your product, the difference being that it is not a physical sample but a digital sample. The effect on the user’s mind, however, is very similar to that of the the physical sample: the user knows what your product looks like, he/she uses it, he/she likes it and he/she wants to buy it.
The takeaway: provide downloadable 3-D models of your products and if possible make them parametric. Your users will appreciate this facility and will be more likely to buy what you are selling.
