Case study
How Harbour Lifestyle Sells a Pergola in Parts - Priced at Every Step, Specified to the Basket.
A pergola is not one product. It is a range, a size, a finish and four sides of options - and the price moves with every one of them.
Harbour Lifestyle sells the PergoSTET pergola range online in the UK. Almost nothing about a pergola is fixed: it can be free standing or wall mounted, three by three metres or four by four, hand-cranked or fully automated, and each of its four sides can take its own blinds and heating. No photo set can show a buyer the exact pergola they are about to order - or what it costs. And a pergola is not an impulse buy. It is a four-figure structure that has to fit one particular patio, ordered by someone who has never seen it standing. We built Harbour Lifestyle a Product Configurator for the full PergoSTET range, embedded directly on the product page. Customers assemble their pergola choice by choice in live 3D, watch the frame rebuild to scale, and see the price in GBP update with every selection.
Three ranges, one way in
The configurator opens the way a good salesperson would: with the choice of range. PergoSTET Plus and Pro are operated by a manual hand crank; Deluxe runs double-layered automated louvres from a remote. Each card says what the line starts at, how it is operated and which extras it takes - so the first decision is an informed one, not a guess. The range architecture is Harbour Lifestyle's own; the configurator follows it rather than flattening it. From there the build is assembled step by step: free standing or wall mounted, 3x3 to 4x4 metres, and - on the Plus - a choice of four finishes, from grey to wood effect. Every change rebuilds the actual frame rather than swapping a photo, and the price follows the exact build. The customer never has to wonder what their choices add up to.
Sides A to D, measured to scale
A pergola is bought around its sides. Each of the four is selected on the model itself and configured on its own: a heater mounted under the roof, side blinds on exactly the side the garden needs them. The options sit in the same panel as the price, so a blind on Side B is immediately a different total - not a surprise at checkout. One click shows outer and inner measurements on the model - height, depth and width, to scale - so the customer knows both whether the pergola fits the patio and how much covered space it leaves. Installation belongs to the same flow: an assembly service and two bolt-down options, with the configurator enforcing the rule that bolt-down requires assembly.
From configuration to the basket
What a customer builds here is not a picture - it is an order waiting to happen. Add to cart hands the configured pergola to the Shopify basket as its full component list, with a thumbnail of the exact build following the order through checkout. Harbour Lifestyle receives orders that are already specified down to the last side. The rules live in the configurator rather than in a document behind it, so a build that reaches the basket is one Harbour Lifestyle can actually build. And for the customers who need one more evening to decide, the configuration does not die with the browser tab. Save & share keeps the build behind a link that reopens it on the product page, ready to send to an email - or to whoever shares the garden. View in AR places the pergola at scale where it will actually stand, before anything is ordered.
One configurator, room for the whole range
The configurator did not start this wide. The Pro range came later, and so did the Deluxe's sliding glass doors - added as 3D assets and rule sets into the same setup, the same Shopify integration and the same feature set. A broader catalogue did not mean a second configurator to build or maintain, and the next addition will not either. More than 100,000 configurations later, this is how a pergola takes shape at Harbour Lifestyle: assembled in live 3D, priced at every step, and handed to the basket fully specified.