Put a kamado in your own garden before you buy it: why we built 3D and AR into the product page

A Large Kamado from Grill Bill weighs 115 kilos, costs 1,499 euros and is 127 centimetres wide with its side tables. That is not an impulse buy. The question we saw most often in customer chat was not "how hot does it get" but "will it fit on my patio" and "how big is Large in real life". Four product photos do not answer that, however good they look.

So we built something that does. Since this week the Pro III product page has a 3D model sitting between the photos. You spin it round, open the lid, check what fits in the grate organizer and place it at true size in your own garden with your phone. This article explains what it does, why we built it and what research says about the effect on sales and returns.

What you see on the product page

Between the product photos there is an extra thumbnail with a small cube on it. Click it and a 3D model of the kamado appears in the same frame. From that moment you can:

• Spin and zoom, with the mouse or two fingers, exactly as you would look at a product in a shop.
• Open the lid by tapping it. You see the grates, the heat deflectors and the multilevel system as they really are.
• Switch parts on and off in an options drawer: stainless or cast iron grates, the charcoal basket, the ash drawer pulled out, the side tables folded down. So you also see what it looks like stored away.
• Pick a background: studio, large garden, veranda, mountains, city garden, or upload a photo of your own patio. The model takes the light direction from that photo.
• On your phone: put it in your garden. The "View in your garden" button opens the camera and places the kamado at true size on the ground. You walk around it, tap for the lid and move it within the orange ring. No app, no download.

On a computer a QR code sits bottom left. Scan it with your phone and the same page opens there, so you can head straight outside. If the code is in the way, you click it down to a small icon.

Why we built this

There are three reasons, and all three come from the day-to-day of the shop itself.

Size is the biggest doubt. Grill Bill sells four kamado sizes. The difference between Medium and Large is hard to see in a photo; in real life it is the difference between a table model and a machine on wheels that takes up half a patio table. Every doubt about size is an email, a chat, or worse: an order that comes back.

Photos show what the photographer chose. The inside, the ash drawer, how the side tables fold, how the grate organizer works: there are separate photos of each, but the customer has to piece them together. In 3D it is all in one model and you look wherever you want.

It had to be in the platform, not next to it. There are standalone 3D services with a monthly fee and their own admin panel. We wanted a shop owner to upload a model in the same place as the product photos, drag the thumbnail between the photos and be done. So it now lives in Neuramerce itself, for every shop running on it.

What research says about 3D and AR in online shops

We are honest about the numbers: the biggest figures come from companies that sell 3D tools, and a kamado is not a lipstick. Still, the independent and the commercial sources point the same way. These are the studies we used, with the source so you can read them yourself.

• Shopify measured across its own stores that products with 3D or AR content converted 94 percent higher than products without. In individual cases on the same platform, shoppers who viewed a 3D model added the product to cart 44 percent more often, and bought 65 percent more often after viewing it in AR (Rebecca Minkoff).
• Deloitte Digital and Snap surveyed 15,000 consumers in 2021: 56 percent say AR gives them more confidence in product quality, and brands with their own AR experience are 41 percent more likely to be considered.
• Houzz, the home platform, found that users who first placed a piece of furniture in their room with AR were 11 times as likely to buy as users who did not.
• Macy's tested virtual furniture viewing in three stores: furniture sales rose by more than 60 percent and the return rate stayed under 2 percent.
• A Google consumer survey, cited by Reydar, found that 66 percent of people want to use AR as a shopping aid.

The common thread: 3D and AR work best for products that are large, expensive and hard to judge. Furniture, kitchens, bikes, and so also a kamado. We will share Grill Bill's own first numbers once enough visitors have gone through it to say anything meaningful; a week of data is not research.

How we built it, without the tech talk

From drawing to model. The kamado's manufacturer has a technical 3D drawing, the kind of file the moulds are made from. That drawing is far too heavy for a web page: hundreds of parts, every bolt separate. We reduced it to what a customer wants to see, added the colours and materials (matt ceramic, hardwood, stainless steel, cast iron) and ran a light study over it so shadows fall in the right place. The result is a file of a few megabytes that any modern phone can handle.

Parts you can switch. Every part you can buy separately or leave out in the shop (grates, deflectors, charcoal basket, side tables) is its own layer in the model. The options drawer switches those layers on or off. That is also how you pull out the ash drawer and fold the side tables down, exactly like the real thing.

True size. The model is accurate to the centimetre: 127 wide, 77 deep, 124 high. That is why it is right when you put it in your garden. Your phone recognises the floor, the kamado lands on it and stays where you put it, even as you walk around.

Speed. This was our biggest worry. A product page that gets slower sells worse, the exact opposite of what we wanted. So the viewer only loads when someone clicks the 3D thumbnail. Until that click, the page pays for one small script. We measured it: without a click the page loads exactly as fast as before.

In the admin. For the shop owner it is a tile next to the product photos. Upload the model, pick a poster (or have one generated), drag the tile to the right spot, save. The texts in the viewer can be set per language, so the English and German product pages got it the same day.

Which shops this is for

Not every shop. Making a 3D model costs time and money, and for a bag of coffee or a t-shirt it adds little. It pays off when your product meets two of these three conditions:

• Large or expensive, so the customer hesitates over size or the investment. Furniture, outdoor kitchens, bikes, sports equipment, lighting.
• Complex, with parts, positions or configurations that photos cannot explain well.
• Often returned for a reason tied to expectations: too big, not as imagined, does not fit.

If you already have a 3D drawing from your supplier, half the work is done. If not, having a model made usually costs a few hundred to a few thousand euros per product, depending on complexity. Set that against the margin on one extra sale or one return fewer and you quickly know whether it adds up.

If your shop runs on Neuramerce, the feature is already available. Want to know whether it makes sense for your products? Send us a photo and a price and we will tell you honestly.