Build it, price it, send it: what a product configurator is actually for

• Eight cabinets, one interface, $1,999 to $14,999. The HideAway at $1,999 closes its hood and stops looking like an arcade machine, which is how it gets into a living room instead of a basement. In the configurator it actually closes, because a photograph cannot explain a thing that transforms.

• The Final Boss at $14,999 is the opposite argument: four players, 53 by 34 by 78 inches, three screens running at once, guitars and a drum pedal. Furniture that dominates a room on purpose.

• In between: the Retro Revival at $2,199, three sizes of Level Up from $2,799 to $3,999, the Phantom Evolution at $3,700, and a portable case.
• Nine model files, every cabinet except the portable case, loaded from Dennis's own SolidWorks export.

• The same three controls under every machine. Save link. Build sheet. Then the enquiry, the only one whose wording changes by machine: "Reserve build slot" on the ones with a list price, "Call to spec yours" on the Final Boss, which is a conversation rather than an order. Nobody has to learn a second interface to price the expensive one.
• His machines, not our approximation. We started by drawing our own version of his product. Near-enough silhouette, deck at the wrong height, buttons roughly right. We threw it away. A customer who has seen the real machine recognises a fake, and from that moment every number on the page becomes a claim rather than a fact. The least glamorous decision on the project, probably the most important.
• Pricing in the open. The price moves as you choose: machine, internals, button package, sound, controls. Custom artwork is a line item, not a conversation. "Call for pricing" filters out the people who would have bought and keeps the people who were never going to. A $14,999 machine should say $14,999.

• Save link. The whole build encodes into a URL. Send it to a partner, reopen it next week, paste it into an email to Dennis. Nothing is lost between the evening someone spent choosing and the morning they decide.
• Build sheet. A plain-text summary of exactly what was selected, with the price and the artwork notes. Not a PDF. Something a person can paste into a message and a builder can read without opening the site.
• The enquiry. It arrives already knowing the machine, the options and the number. Dennis is not starting from "hi, how much is an arcade machine".
• Yes, but: rotating a cabinet is impressive for about eight seconds, then it is wallpaper. What the 3D buys is that people change things: they try the four-player deck, price the next tier of internals, see what $2,500 of upgrades looks like before deciding against it. Most configurators stop there and hand you a contact form that has no idea what you just spent twenty minutes doing. The build sheet is what turns attention into something quotable.

• The configurator page is slow. 34 out of 100 on a mobile performance test; on a mid-range phone the browser is unresponsive for around seven seconds while it builds the 3D scene, and Three.js plus model loading account for about six and a half of them.
• We know the fix and have not shipped it. The geometry is assembled in the browser on every visit when almost all of it could be baked once at build time and downloaded ready to draw.
• The approach is proven on the same site. The Arcade 101 page took 7.8 seconds to show its main content on a phone and locked the browser for 3.3 seconds. It now shows in about 3.6 seconds with 1.9 seconds of blocking, with no image or video degraded.

• What a search engine sees: an estimated total of $0, because the price is calculated in the browser and a crawler does not run it. On the list with the performance work. Saying this out loud is deliberate: a case study that reports only wins is not describing a real project.

• What does someone leave with? If the answer is "an impression", the 3D is decoration. They should leave with a link, a sheet, or an enquiry that already contains the build.
• Is the geometry real? The manufacturer's model or an artist's version of it. On a made-to-order product, that is credibility.
• Does the price show? If not, be honest that the tool is a lead filter, and design it as one.
• What does a search engine see? Ours sees $0 today. Check yours.

"Lou is an absolute pleasure to work with. From the moment we started working together till when my website went live, Lou has helped me every step of the way. I have never worked with someone so knowledgeable about what product they offer. I recommend OneAlgorithm but if you do reach out to them make sure you ask for Lou!"

— Dennis Riese, Phantom Arcades, Valrico, FL. Posted on Google, unedited.

He is not a neutral party; he paid for the work. Read it as a client saying the process was worth it, not as evidence that the site performs. The numbers above are the evidence.

• The demanding part was never the 3D. Three.js is well documented and the models were handed to us. The demanding part was deciding what a person walks away holding, and making the page produce that thing.
• Build it, price it, send it. If a configurator does not do the third one, it is a toy with a hosting bill.

Go deeper: what happened to Phantom's search traffic after the rebuild is in the SEO case study. OneAlgorithm designed and developed phantomarcades.com, including the eight-cabinet 3D configurator, the generated build archive and the room fit checker; we build and market websites for small businesses from Malvern, Pennsylvania.