A blog from Openhaus

Hey everyone and welcome back it's my favorite time of the week product update time this is for the week of march 12, 2022. I'm excited about this product update this week because we have so much that we pushed this week that we've been working on for a while and testing for a while and we just made it live and we are actively testing it on several clients stores etc.

Lots of product updates so bear with me as we go through this but the theme I guess of this week's product update is shopify connection and connecting your shopify store with your matterport tours and using openhaus as that bridge i think one of the the stores that i'll show as an example in this product update we help them create a shoppable virtual tour of their showroom in in dallas and i mean we need to get some official numbers we're going to do kind of a case study recap and get some official numbers but i'm not exaggerating when i say that we through this shopify connection that we help them with we save them dozens and dozens of hours tagging their tour and creating this experience so it's a big game changer we're super pumped about it and it's just the beginning.

We're gonna start in our openhaus portal so i'm logged in as one of our clients austin avenue and i'm going to show you some of the the updates we made here so we've previously been testing some connections with shopify and using that to get product data well now we like kind of have an official shopify app that is being reviewed on the app store and why this is important is because one of the biggest hurdles to creating 3d shopping experiences is the product data that goes inside of those shopping experiences first of all it's just really really time consuming if you were to try to go in and add product data one at a time for every product that's in a retail store i'm telling you like i said it would take you dozens and dozens of hours especially if you have a store that has hundreds of skus.

So that's problem number one is product data is complicated there's like i mean if you think about 200 skus and then for each of those skus you have an image or multiple images a title a price a compare at price meaning like what full price is versus the discount price let's see i don't i might have said description already and then that product might have variants basically you can quickly see that you have i mean thousands and thousands of different vectors of product data when you times when you times the the pieces of product data that are required for one product and then you times that by a store that has hundreds of skus inside of it you're talking about thousands tens of thousands of data points that need to be entered manually in a store and trust us we've tried it takes dozens of hours to do that in a 3d experience

So with openhaus and with the openhaus portal and with this shopify bridge that we've created we're saving dozens of hours so that's problem number one problem number two is updating that when a product goes on sale you want to be able to know that inside of your virtual store experience so if if i have a product that we decide to sell at 50 on e-commerce and in person well i also want my virtual store to represent that 50 off as well or if a product goes out of stock if i get out of inventory you don't want to have to go into your virtual store experience and hide that tag and do all that manually you just don't want to have to think about it so with the shopify bridge and soon other commerce platform bridges that we're actively developing you are going to be able to have all of that product data dynamically refreshed and updated inside of your spaces so your virtual store just it represents what's taking place in your physical retail store and in your your commerce platform backbone.

For this i want you to put yourself in the shoes of austin avenue you're an e-commerce brand and you wanted to connect to your shopify store with your openhaus portal account so we added this new section if you have a shopify store in your openhaus portal you can click manage shopify i'm going to click austin avenue it says i'm connected to austin avenue dot my shopify my latest sync was on march 22nd at 3 48. march 22nd now this is going to sync for us, we're working on efficiency and making this sync faster but you can see right here that there's 313 products at least that are being uh synced with my openhaus portal so you can see those products here not going to take you through all that but it's just giving you a preview of all the products that are being synced from shopify and going to be made inside of openhaus now i'm going to go back to my portal and i'm going to show you how this is important so austin avenue they place a lot of product in influencers homes and what they'll do is using openhaus they will create 3d shopping experiences of those influencers homes that the influencers can share with their audience shop the austin avenue products etc.

So there's only a couple homes showing up here but i'll show you an example of one so if i click on caroline's home i can see the home you guys have seen this before this is my manage space page i can see the rooms in this home and i'm going to scroll down and i'm going to choose a room i'll click bedrooms here actions add products so this is what's different this is so awesome. Normally you know if i am not connected to shopify this is how you normally add products you get the product link and then you click on the matter tag to say this is the matter tag that this is but now because austin avenue has connected their shopify account with their openhaus portal i can click choose a store austin avenue which is the store we i just showed you was synced and now i can add products to this bedroom and caroline's home but i'm using my austin avenue catalog, this one is not gonna work we're gonna have to rewind this but because the products have already been tagged in here the matter tag excuse me let me zoom out the matter tag that was just right here won't appear but pretend like we haven't tagged this room yet and the matter tag is right here what i'll do is i will choose a product and it's loading my my products and my catalog and you can see all of these products that have been dynamically uploaded from my shopify store because i connected it all my shopify product data uh is in here looks like we have a couple of duplicates from uh austin avenue in here so we'll have to go in and clean that up like i said hey this is new we're testing we're getting it set up but all of these products are from austin avenue's shopify catalog i click on chandelier here and then if i hadn't tagged this home already i would click matter tag and then click on the the tag that i wanted to then i can add another product same deal let's choose this sofa mater tag boom pretty cool so normally like i said that process would take hours and hours and hours for you to manually go look at your product catalog have your 3d tour 3d experience pulled up and then you would have to copy and paste product title product image product description for each and every single product in your store but with this all of your catalog product data is at your fingertips so you can use it when you're tagging your spaces so saving a bunch of time and we're super super proud of this let me check my notes here what else are we talking about.

As i mentioned okay i'll give you another example so scout design studio they're one of our uh newer clients and we're super pumped to be working with them they have a really really cool store in dallas and they have a shopify ecommerce store online but they also have a retail showroom in dallas and they part of their product catalog you can kind of see up here they have furniture lighting and decor vintage pieces etc they have kind of an interesting use case because a lot of their vintage pieces are one of ones so they might have wall art that they have multiple you know inventory count of but their vintage pieces are like one of ones they're antiques or other vintage furniture that has been repurposed and being resold through scout design studio and so it's really important for them if they have one of these 101 pieces sell it needs to become unavailable because if someone buys it in the store or online  it can't be available for sale still through the virtual tour and so every two hours and and this is on their recommendation we're playing with  how often we update the the tour we're starting with two hours but every two hours their catalog will be synced between shopify and between openhaus so that if that product had sold it will become no longer visible in the 3d tour so if someone's browsing their virtual showroom they won't be able to purchase that one-of-one vintage piece and so that's really important for inventory management so you don't have customers that are upset that hey i was in this virtual showroom and i went to buy this vintage table and it turns out i can't because their product catalog is being updated dynamically via openhaus that's not going to happen a couple other things.

I'll note too that we updated i need to use my trackpad here but a couple of other things that we updated here is let me get this connected real fast connected there we go trackpad's a little bit better for these matterport tours we also updated our product modal we call it our product pop-up so what's interesting about shopify and other e-commerce platforms is that the product descriptions are actually html and we previously had it set up so that your product description section first of all it couldn't be very long which was an issue and it could only be text it wouldn't take html code we have since up updated that so now this product description section can be very long and it will just you know scroll within this little container we have here but then also you can see there's different font styles and different sizes and that is the ability to use html so when you import your your product description when that when that imports from shopify it will use the html styles that you had in your shopify product descriptions which is important because if someone's walking around the store and they click on this rug there is important information in these product descriptions that you want to make sure they know with something like italics or if you wanted to you know link out to something else where they can get more information you can include that here if you wanted to have headings lists etc we can support all of that now which is really really cool.

Another thing we updated too going along with that is our product group pop-up which is similar so we increased the image size so it looks a little bit better i think images are obviously more important than even the text sometimes so i increased images here we also updated the product description section so within this product group model i can scroll through and i can see all of this product description uh data so this has been kind of a a test for us so if you have any advice or you know feedback on how we can improve this product group pop up please please let us know a couple other points on this on the scout design studio.

Let me go to okay this is a home called flip house from austin avenue and it's with a creator that they work with named design loves detail and as you can see i'm actually viewing this on openhaus i don't know if you can see in the screen share but you can see that i am an openhaus url so this experience is taking place on openhaus's website an example of this might be let's say austin avenue in an instagram story they shared a swipe up link to design love's details home and it takes you just directly into the home on openhaus when i'm viewing the experience on openhaus when i'm shopping inside of this person's home i want to show you how the cart works so when i click on this i'm going to add it to a cart and you can see that this cart button over here appears and i can click on the cart and i can see the product that i added to my shopping cart i can remove it and i can go back add it to my cart again shopping cart and then i can proceed to checkout and i can check out through openhaus this is all taking place on openhaus the car the checkout functionality etc when i'm on openhaus i am using openhaus's cart and openhaus is checkout however sometimes that's not tenable that doesn't work if you are using this experience on a web page so what i mean by that is we make it really easy for our clients to embed their 3d shopping experiences anywhere on their websites.

So i'll give you an example again with austin avenue this is just a web page that's featuring design looks details collection and the furniture items in her home if i scroll down i can see that her 3d home tour is embedded on this webpage and right on top of this product or on this webpage on austin avenue i can you know have the same experience so i'm not on openhaus's website i'm on austin avenue's shopify store another way that our clients have been embedding their tours is we have a cool api that allows you to embed these 3d experiences on product pages so this is a product page for this couch i'll click on this little pop-up and it shows me you know what this product looks like inside of molly's home on a product page now the reason why i bring that up is because i said on openhaus when you're viewing the space on openhaus it will use openhaus's cart and openhaus's check out so you can kind of purchase the the products that you want to without ever leaving the virtual shopping experience however if in like the the case that i showed you here this is embedded on you know a shopify store or on a web page it will actually use the shopify store's cart function and checkout instead of openhaus which we think is really really cool.

So you can if you embed this virtual showroom like scout design has done let me refresh this page we're on scout designs web how website right now not on openhaus i'm going to scroll down and click on this 3d space and when i'm viewing this 3d space on scout design's website it will actually use scout design studios cart instead of the openhaus cart you can see right here the cart button doesn't even appear because this is on scout design studios website when i click on scout design tag right there i can see this product and if i want to add it to the cart it will actually use scout designs cart check this out add to cart boom they added it to scout designs cart not to the openhaus card so i'm still on scout design studio's website seamless just as if i was on a product page and clicked add to cart on this website same thing with this virtual tour experience because it's embedded on scout design studios website it will use their cart and checkout and i can just click back and it'll take me right back to this virtual showroom experience so really really cool  let's see let me just look at my list of other updates we have here

i think i think that just about does it for updates we wanted to share one other just kind of i guess user experience update that i'll note too this scout design studio store has hundreds literally hundreds i think it turned out to be over 300 plus skus that were tagged in this store one thing we didn't love about previous openhaus experiences was when a space has a lot of tags in it it can tend to look pretty busy and so if in the past when if i was in this space a few weeks ago on openhaus and i looked out here because there's so many products tagged in this space you would just see dozens i mean dozens and dozens hundreds of tags across this room and when i look across you would see dozens and hundreds of tags across this room as well you'd see the one clear in the back i know there's a product that's tagged clear back here before a couple weeks ago before we implemented this upgrade you would see those tags and it would just look like a big jumbled mess well now what we have done is that as you walk around these shopping experiences you will only be you'll only see the tags that are in close proximity to where you're at in the space so watch as i walk around this space tags will appear and disappear depending on my proximity so it makes a much better user experience and i think it's more realistic right like if you are if you are physically standing in the scout design studio if you looked out over the over the store you wouldn't actually see just a sea of tags you know you only basically see the product tag as you approach the product and that's the same exact experience that we're going for here you will only see the tags that are in close proximity to where you are in the store so and i think an example of things going out of stock and open house updating that i know that when we actually helped them create this virtual shopping experience initially that several of these products were tagged and you can tell these are some of their vintage products i know that these were tagged when we first helped them create the experience and because they have been sold over the last week or so

Openhaus has updated the tour to hide those tags so if i'm walking around this virtual experience i'm not going to be able to purchase these because they were already purchased in the store so anyways pretty pretty cool as usual please let us know what feedback you have what questions you have but that kind of does it for our product update for this week i can kind of preview some of the stuff we have been working on and that will be launching next week and first is efficiency and you kind of saw in in that tour loaded really quickly since we've started really focusing on helping people create shopping experiences that has meant a lot more product data needs to be loaded into the tour and that slowed things down significantly so we've been working hard on efficiency making sure product data is loaded into the tour in an efficient manner so it always runs right we've also been working hard on improving our embeds and we actually have some some cool stuff that has some cool projects that we'll be showing uh next product update where we've done some really cool custom embeds for some clients that i think you probably have heard of so we're excited about that and i think that just about does it but we will catch you on our next product update please like i said share this with anyone that you know that might be interested in creating a 3d shopping experience and let us know what feedback and questions that you have. Thanks!

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