GaraDry sells garage door threshold seals, and choosing the right one isn’t simple. The seal has to be taller than the largest gap, the right length for the opening, the right profile for the floor, with the right amount of adhesive. That advice usually happens on the phone. The kit builder puts it on the website: six questions that return the exact kit, length, adhesive, accessories and total price, with prices read live from the store.
At a glance
| Client | GaraDry (US store) |
| Type | Shopify product configurator |
| Work | Research, sizing logic, the tool itself, live catalogue sync, responsive testing, Shopify installation plan |
| Status | Built and working; not yet installed on the live store |
The commercial problem
Threshold seals are easy to get wrong. Measure the gap in one place instead of three, pick a seal that’s the same height as the gap rather than taller, choose a flat profile for a sloping floor, or buy the wrong length, and the seal leaks or doesn’t fit. A wrong order means a return, and returning a long seal is expensive to ship both ways.
The product information on the store was thorough but spread across a buying guide, blog posts, FAQs and the variant dropdowns. Some details, such as how many adhesive cartridges each kit needs, only appeared inside the variant options.
The SEO and AI search strategy
The kit builder sits within GaraDry’s wider search strategy, and it connects to it in five ways:
| Area | The aim | What it involved |
|---|---|---|
| Accurate product information | Give customers, search engines and AI answers one consistent set of facts | Checking the store’s pages against each other and flagging three places where customer-facing figures differed |
| Answering sizing questions | Answer the questions people search before buying | The sizing rules behind the tool, expressed in plain language on the page |
| Conversion | Turn visitors from search into correct orders | A six-question configurator returning the exact kit and total |
| Live accuracy | Keep prices and options right without manual updates | Prices, variants and adhesive counts read live from the Shopify catalogue |
| Mobile experience | Work for people measuring their garage on a phone | Testing at 11 screen widths, with large, uniform tap targets |
The store’s pages and the tool now need to agree with each other. Where AI Overviews and assistants quote a product page, a figure that differs between two pages is a risk to the answer customers get. The contradictions were raised with GaraDry and fixed.
What was built
Six questions, one exact answer. The tool asks about the door, the gap, water, the floor and how the garage is used, then returns the right seal, the length, the number of adhesive cartridges, accessories such as foam inserts, and the total. It warns about floor preparation where it matters, such as new concrete needing time to cure or dusty concrete needing sealing first.
Sizing rules encoded from the store’s own guidance. Among them: the seal must be taller than the largest gap, measured at three points; a seal only holds standing water to its own height; ramped profiles suit sloping floors; and the seal fits behind the door, never in front.
Range limits made visible. Some limits weren’t stated anywhere on the store, such as the widest opening a particular seal covers in one piece. The tool makes them clear before someone orders the wrong thing.
Live catalogue sync. Prices, variant IDs, stock and adhesive counts are read live from the store for every kit and accessory, and the tool falls back to stored values if the connection fails. Mapping was checked across all 66 length options in the nine kits plus the five accessories, with no misses, and the check found one adhesive count on the store that had changed since the concept was built.
Built for phones. The tool was tested at 11 widths from 320 to 1440 pixels, with no horizontal overflow and every option at least 48 pixels tall.
Installation
The production version is built to drop into the store’s own theme as a section, in a duplicate theme first, and shown to the client in their theme before anything is published. Add to cart will add the whole kit in one step once installed. At the time of writing, it isn’t yet live on the store.
The result
[PAUL TO ADD: results after launch, such as use of the tool, fewer sizing calls or returns, if measured.]
What I learned
Building a tool exposes where a store’s information disagrees with itself. Encoding the sizing rules meant reading every page that mentioned them, and three customer-facing figures didn’t match across the buying guide, a blog post and the FAQs. A configurator can only be as right as the facts it’s built on, so checking those facts came first.
A tool like this is only as useful as its connection to the store. Pulling prices and products live from the Shopify catalogue, rather than hard-coding them, means the kit builder can’t recommend something the store no longer sells or quote an out-of-date price, and that matters more to a customer’s trust than any clever feature.
Limitations
The tool isn’t yet installed on the live store, so there are no usage or sales results to report. The US and UK stores are separate, so a UK version would be a second build with its own catalogue mapping.
Services used
This project drew on Shopify apps and product builders, interactive tools and calculators and Shopify development. It sits in home, garage and DIY products, and the wider search work is covered in the GaraDry case study.
FAQ
What is a product configurator?
A product configurator asks a shopper a few questions, such as measurements and conditions, and returns the exact product, size and accessories they need, with the total price. It turns expert advice that normally happens on the phone into something customers can use on the website at any time.
Can a tool on Shopify use live prices?
Yes. Shopify stores expose product data, including prices, variants and stock, that a tool running on the store can read. The GaraDry kit builder reads prices and variant details live from the store, so it stays accurate when prices change, and falls back to stored values if the connection fails.
Do interactive tools help SEO?
They can, indirectly. A genuinely useful tool gives people a reason to visit, stay and come back, can earn links from other sites, and often answers questions that would otherwise go unanswered on the page. Its main value is usually helping customers buy the right thing.
Could your customers use a tool like this?
Get in touch about the questions your customers ask most, or start with a free assessment.