When Forma Commerce's head of product, Isabelle Hartmann, first heard about ShapeBox, she was skeptical. Her team had tried embedding 3D models before — it had taken three months, two contractors, and a WebGL library that nobody on the team could maintain.
"We needed something our designers could actually own," she told us. "Not another black box."
Eight weeks after adopting ShapeBox, Forma Commerce had shipped interactive 3D viewers across their entire furniture catalogue. Add-to-cart rates on those pages climbed 38% compared to the same products with static photography.
The problem: flat images don't sell furniture
Forma Commerce is a mid-market platform for independent furniture brands. Their merchants live and die by product presentation — a badly-lit photo can sink a launch that took months to prepare.
The existing workflow looked like this:
- Photographer shoots product from 4–6 angles
- Retoucher processes and exports 12–20 image variants per product
- Frontend team uploads and formats everything for the product page
- Customer still can't see the back of the sofa, or how the fabric looks in different lighting
Cart abandonment surveys kept surfacing the same theme: "I wasn't sure what it would look like in real life."
Why they chose ShapeBox
Isabelle's team evaluated three options:
- Custom WebGL — ruled out immediately (no maintainability)
- A dedicated 3D commerce SaaS — promising, but the viewer was a black-box iframe with limited brand control
- ShapeBox — a full creation and publishing platform they could own end-to-end
The decision came down to one demo. A designer on the Forma team built a working 3D viewer for a dining chair — complete with material swapping and a 360° orbit control — in 45 minutes, using an existing GLTF file from their asset library.
"The editor just made sense. It felt like Figma but for 3D. We had our first scene live in the same afternoon."
— Isabelle Hartmann, Head of Product, Forma Commerce
The implementation
Forma Commerce's workflow now looks like this:
1. Asset preparation
Their 3D artists export optimised .glb files from Blender (under 4 MB per model, LOD baked in). ShapeBox's import handles the rest — no manual texture recompression or mesh optimisation needed.
2. Scene authoring in ShapeBox
Each product scene is built around a simple template:
- Background: a neutral studio environment (soft shadows, HDRI lighting)
- Material variants: ShapeBox's visual scripting connects fabric/finish swatches to material swaps on the model in real time
- Camera presets: three locked views (front, detail, context) plus free-orbit mode
Designers configure this entirely in the ShapeBox editor — no code.
3. Embedding via the ShapeBox JS SDK
Forma's frontend team drops a single snippet into their product page template:
<script src="https://cdn.shapebox.io/embed.js"></script>
<div
data-shapebox-scene="scene_abc123"
data-shapebox-variant="{{ product.selected_variant }}"
style="width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4/3;"
></div>
The ShapeBox embed picks up the variant parameter and swaps materials automatically — no custom JS required on Forma's side.
4. Analytics
ShapeBox's built-in interaction analytics showed the team which camera angles customers used most (the detail shot, by a wide margin) and which material variants were most frequently compared — insights they fed directly back into their photography brief for future products.
The results
After rolling out 3D viewers to their top 120 SKUs over a four-week period:
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add-to-cart rate | 4.1% | 5.7% | +38% |
| Return rate (furniture) | 18% | 12% | −33% |
| Avg. time on product page | 1m 42s | 2m 58s | +75% |
| Support tickets ("not as described") | 24/month | 9/month | −63% |
The return-rate drop was the number that got the attention of Forma's CEO. Furniture returns are expensive — shipping, inspection, restocking. A 6-point reduction across the catalogue translated directly to margin.
What's next
Forma Commerce is now piloting augmented reality previews using ShapeBox's WebXR export. Shoppers on iOS and Android can tap "View in your room" directly from the product page — no app install required.
They're also exploring ShapeBox's plugin API to build a custom "room builder" tool: a guided flow where customers assemble a curated set of products into a saved scene they can share or return to.
If you're building a commerce experience and want to explore what ShapeBox can do for your product pages, get started for free — or join us on Discord and tell us what you're working on.