Differentiation through individuality
By individually tailoring products to customers' specific needs, companies can effectively differentiate themselves from mass-producing competitors: individually tailored products are often percieved as more attractive by customers and are not as easily comparable as mass-produced goods. In many cases, this allows companies to sidestep the pure price-cutting competion characteristic of mass production.

Reduced capital commitment and less overproduction
Since production will ideally be geared to actual demand rather than to keeping the warehouse filled, the capital commitment and high costs associated with stock-keeping can effectively be reduced. In addition, no more sales or special reductions are required for selling-off surplus production.
Costs can be lowered further by interacting with customers online via Internet. Thus, by making real-life sales advisors redundant, staff can be reduced. Similarly, by selling direclty to their customers, producers can often bypass costly intermediaries.

Better knowledge of customers' needs
By registering customers' needs immediately and accurately, new market opportunities can be discovered rapidly and the products adapted accordingly. Companies using Mass Customization side-by-side with conventional mass production can profitably transfer and employ their knowledge of customers' needs.

Higher customer loyalty
Information gained during the configuration process (product specifications, customer profiles, etc.) work in favour of durable customer relationships. On one hand, this information can be used to adress customers individually. On the other hand, it can be accessed and re-used for follow-up orders. A second configuration will therefore be significantly quicker than the initial one. This provides an incentive for customers to remain loyal to the company rather than switch to another company and restart the entire configuration process from scratch.

Shopping as experience
(In the case of direct interaction between manufacturer and customers on the Web) the creative aspects of configuration represent a special experience for many customers. The process is therefore suitable to emotionally tie customers to a product by allowing them to become designers. But integrating customers into the design process not only strenghtens identification with the product, it also results in a positive percepetion of the actual sales process. This directly affects customers' satisfaction with the acquired product, particularly in the field of online-retailing.

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