ATC Semitec Ltd supplies temperature sensing and thermal protection components from Northwich, Cheshire. Their customers are design engineers, and design engineers do not browse. They arrive with a resistance value, a temperature rating and a deadline. They want a part number, a datasheet, and a few pieces they can put on a bench this week.
That creates a commercial problem most component manufacturers never quite solve. It is easy to ask them for a quote for ten thousand parts and impossible to buy ten. So the engineer evaluating a part today goes to a distributor for the handful they need, and the production order eighteen months later goes wherever that evaluation went. The part gets designed in by somebody else’s part number.
Everything we have built for ATC Semitec exists to close that gap. A tool that answers “which sensor for this job” without anyone picking up a phone. A shop that sells small quantities of real production parts at published prices, so an engineer can order at three in the afternoon and get on with it. And steady SEO work underneath both, so the engineers searching for those parts arrive at ATC Semitec rather than somewhere else. Here is what each one does, and what a manufacturer with a technical catalogue should take from it.
Key takeaways
- A 3D selector lets an engineer click the part of an electric vehicle they are working on and get back the sensors ATC Semitec recommends for it. That answers the question they actually have, without a phone call.
- Behind those six clickable areas sit six ordinary web pages that search engines can read and rank. The tool sells, and it also earns traffic. Most interactive widgets do only the first.
- The sample shop lets an engineer buy ten of something instead of requesting a quote for ten thousand: 49 products, published prices from £10 exc. VAT, ordered without anybody in the office being involved.
- Every product is listed under the part number the engineer already has written on their schematic, which is the cheapest thing a component supplier can do to get found.
- Underneath both runs continuous SEO work, including finding the pages that already rank but do not get clicked. That is demand that exists and is being wasted.
ATC Semitec, at the time of writing.
A selector that answers the question engineers actually ask
“Which sensor do I use?” is a question about location, not about specification. An engineer working on a battery pack has different constraints to one working on a charging port, even though both need an NTC thermistor.
ATC Semitec’s electric vehicle range spans miniature thin-film 0201-size SMD NTCs for battery management systems, AEC-Q200 qualified SMD flip-chip RTDs, ring terminal surface sensors and IP67-rated assemblies. Presented as a flat list, that range takes work to navigate. Presented as a vehicle you can rotate and click, it becomes obvious. The selector reframes the catalogue around the engineer’s mental model: they are not thinking “I need a 103AT-11”, they are thinking “I need something for the charging port”. The tool answers the second question and returns the first.
You can use it below. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, and click a highlighted component to see the recommended parts for that subsystem.
How the selector is built, and why it does not slow the site down
The short version, for anyone weighing up whether a tool like this is a liability: it is built as a separate application and dropped into the page, so the weight of the 3D machinery only ever lands on the one page that needs it. Every other page on the site is untouched by it. The detail below is for the technical reader.
It is a Nuxt.js application, statically generated and served from our client hosting, then embedded into the WordPress page. The 3D scene runs on three.js.
The vehicle model loads through GLTFLoader with DRACOLoader attached, so the mesh geometry is Draco-compressed rather than shipped raw. That matters commercially, not just technically: a wireframe car body carries a lot of triangles, and Draco compression is the difference between a tool an engineer waits for and a tool an engineer abandons. Camera work uses a PerspectiveCamera with OrbitControls for the drag, zoom and pan interaction.
Six subsystems are mapped as selectable zones, each returning the parts ATC Semitec recommends for that job:
| Subsystem | Example part shown |
|---|---|
| Battery Management System | Semitec JT |
| Battery Pack | ATC Semitec STS2 |
| Charging Port | Semitec 103AT-11 |
| Coolant System | Heraeus sinterable chip |
| Electric Heater | SEKI ST12 |
| Electric Motor | Heraeus EC3032 |
Building it as a standalone application rather than a WordPress plugin was a deliberate call. The 3D dependencies are heavy, and this keeps them off the main site’s critical path entirely. Pages that do not need three.js never load it. The main site stays fast; the selector gets the budget it needs.
Each subsystem links through to its own landing page on the main site: /ev-battery-packs/, /ev-charging-ports/ and so on. That is the commercial half of the design, and it is the half most interactive tools get wrong. A clever widget that keeps everything locked inside itself is invisible to Google. You pay for it once and it earns nothing in search, forever. This one feeds six real pages that can rank for the way engineers actually search: by the job, not the part number. The tool earns twice.
A buying route built for the design stage
Most component manufacturers make it easy to request a quote for ten thousand parts and impossible to buy ten. That gap is where evaluation happens, and it is the gap the sample shop closes. Live at shop.atcsemitec.co.uk, it sells small quantities of real production parts, in fixed packs, at published prices, to engineers who are still designing. It runs on WordPress and WooCommerce with an Elementor child theme.
In ATC Semitec’s own words, it exists so engineers can “easily source small quantities of products for NPD, testing, spares or repairs.” Not a free-samples request form, and not a full trade counter. It is a self-service route between the two, which is exactly the route most component suppliers leave unbuilt.
Building for that buyer meant designing the store around how a specifier works, not how a retail shopper does.
- Pack-based pricing, not per-unit. Products carry a stated pack size at a flat price. A Semifuse 9A PTC resettable fuse, for example, is “Pack Size: 10 Pcs” at £20.00 exc. VAT. An engineer does not want to calculate a price break for a prototype run. They want to know what ten of them costs.
- Ex-VAT pricing throughout. Every price displays “exc. VAT”. This is a business-to-business store and it reads like one.
- Real part numbers as SKUs. That Semifuse carries SKU
SFLR900F. A Campini adjustable thermostat isTY-53 070. These are the manufacturer’s own designations. They are the strings an engineer already has written on a schematic, and the strings they will paste into a search box. - Specification in the product title. The catalogue splits by temperature rating rather than by family. “SEKI ST-22 150°C Auto-Reset Thermal Cut-Out” and “SEKI ST-22 50°C Auto-Reset Thermal Cut-Out” are separate products, not variants behind a dropdown. That is more products to maintain, 49 across 24 categories at the time of writing. Each one matches how the part is actually specified and searched for.
- Datasheet and main-site links on every product. Each listing carries a “View Data Sheet” link and a “View on ATC Semitec” link back to the full technical page. The shop never pretends to be the complete technical resource. It hands off.
- A phone number for everything else. “Can’t see exactly what you need or need larger quantities, please ring our Technical Sales Team.” The shop handles the straightforward orders; the sales team keeps the conversations worth having. Nobody is pushed through a checkout that cannot serve them.
The strategic point is that the shop is a qualification engine as much as a revenue line. An engineer who buys a ten-pack of thermal cut-outs is designing something. If the part works, the production order follows, and it goes through the technical sales team with the specification decision already made.
Why the shop sits on its own subdomain
To let two different jobs be done properly. The main site is a technical reference library; the shop is a transactional store. They have different templates, different navigation and different success measures. Keeping them apart means WooCommerce, its cart fragments and its checkout scripts never load on a main-site datasheet page.
The engineer never feels the seam. The shop’s category menu mirrors the main site’s product taxonomy, so anyone who knows one knows the other: NTC Thermistors, NTC Temperature Sensors, Platinum RTD Temp Sensors, Thermostats, Thermal Protection, Circuit Protection. A persistent “Return to Main Site” bar sits above the header, and product pages link back individually. The separation is architectural, not experiential.
The SEO work that keeps both earning
A component catalogue is one of the harder SEO problems there is. You have hundreds of near-identical pages differentiated only by a temperature rating or a resistance value. Thin-content risk is constant, index bloat is constant, and the queries that matter are often low-volume part numbers rather than fat head terms like “thermistor”. Handled badly, a technical catalogue competes with itself.
Our work for ATC Semitec runs as recurring workstreams rather than one-off deliverables: a full technical SEO audit, a Google Search Console query breakdown, a low-CTR report identifying pages that rank but do not get clicked, and periodic indexing reviews. The low-CTR work is the one manufacturers tend to overlook. A page sitting at position six with a title tag that does not name the part is a solved ranking problem and an unsolved commercial one. Fixing it is cheap, and it converts demand that already exists.
That work sits alongside web design and marketing support, which is why the EV selector and the sample shop look and behave like parts of one brand rather than three separate procurement exercises. For more on how we approach this sector, see our SEO service and our work on international SEO for UK manufacturers.
What another manufacturer can take from this
Three things, and none of them require a 3D car.
- Organise around the customer’s problem, not your catalogue structure. ATC Semitec’s range is organised internally by component family. The EV selector reorganises it by vehicle subsystem, because that is how the buying engineer thinks. You can do the same with a filtered, application-led listing page and no WebGL at all.
- Make it easy to buy ten. The engineer evaluating your part today is the buyer specifying it in eighteen months. A self-service route to small quantities turns an enquiry you might not get into a design-in you can measure.
- Use the part number your customer uses. Manufacturer SKUs in titles, in URLs, in page copy. It is the single highest-leverage on-page SEO move available to a component supplier, and it costs nothing.
We wrote more about interactive product tools in 3D tech in ecommerce and search, and about the wider picture in website tips for manufacturers.
Frequently asked questions
What platform is the ATC Semitec sample shop built on?
WordPress with WooCommerce, using a Hello Elementor child theme and Elementor Pro, on the shop.atcsemitec.co.uk subdomain. It carries 49 products across 24 categories, with Max Mega Menu handling the category navigation and Google Tag Manager deployed for measurement.
What technology does the 3D selector use?
Nuxt.js for the application shell and three.js for the 3D scene. The vehicle model is loaded via GLTFLoader with Draco mesh compression, and navigation uses OrbitControls on a PerspectiveCamera. It is served as a standalone application and embedded, so its dependencies never load on the rest of the site.
Does the sample shop offer free samples?
No. It sells small fixed-quantity packs of production parts at published prices, exclusive of VAT, starting at £10.00. It is designed for prototyping, testing, spares and repairs, so an engineer can order what they need without raising an enquiry or waiting for a quote.
Do I need a 3D model to build a product selector?
No. The value is in mapping products to applications, not in the rendering. A well-structured filter on an application-led landing page delivers most of the same benefit at a fraction of the build, and it is usually where we would start.
Working with us
ATC Semitec is a long-standing client, and the work reflects that: a component selector, a shop, and steady technical SEO underneath, each built when it was the right thing to build rather than as a single big-bang project. That is how we prefer to work: earn the next piece, then build it properly.
If you manufacture something technical and your website is not doing the work your sales team needs it to do, get in touch. We specialise in digital marketing for manufacturers.
