New to Cylindo? Get a brief introduction to the core concepts, the terminology and platform overview here.
The Platform
The Cylindo platform is created in a way that allows our customers to get the most out of the 360 HD Viewer and a few products gravitating around it, which have the ultimate goal to help our customers be smarter about their customers while offering the best in class customer experience.
The 360 HD Viewer
The Viewer is the core product and allows for single product visualization, configuration and display across product pages. It is a lightweight JavaScript component that can integrate easily into any web technology, ecommerce platform or ERP system. With the 360 HD Viewer you can display external, non-Cylindo content as well, like videos and images, which allows you to have a consistent UX across all your product pages, even if some of them do not have 360 degree imagery.
Room Scenes
Room scenes come as an addition to the 360 HD Viewer and are intended to enrich the shopping experience online, by providing context to the visualized products with the Viewer. In this way, your end users can see a full room scene in which they can configure their item of preference and make a buying decision faster. The whole intention of Cylindo Room Scenes is to offer additional in-context inspiration during the shopping lifecycle.
Content API
This API is the go-to place for all your Cylindo produced content. Using this powerful tool, you have endless possibilities to re-use your Cylindo content in many different use cases. You can generate any size image in up to 4096 px, in any angle and any variation of the product. These images can be used for marketing collateral, printing catalogs and articles, as well as many easily managed digital use cases, like thumbnail images in shopping carts, product feed pages, spec sheets, orderlist PDFs, etc. The API can serve all this content for you in a very simple way, so you won’t have to manage all that content.
Cylindo Intelligence
Intelligence is the place from which you can learn about your ROI and leverage performance metrics for your 360 Viewers, which you can then utilize in your decision making process. In Intelligence, you can track the performance of your Viewers over selected periods of time, you can find out info about top performing products, most popular configurations, peaks in page activity by day, week or month, zoom and 360 spin engagement, etc. Even more than that, with Intelligence you can track your conversions. Once you implement conversion tracking on your site, you will be able to find out which of your product sell best, how many had purchase intent vs. successful checkouts.
There are many technical aspects of the Cylindo platform that are made to adapt to exactly your needs. Depending on how you make and implement these choices, you can customize your product page experience and give it a touch of your business.
Terminology
In your Cylindo life, you will encounter a certain terminology that our professionals use during the different stages of development of our project. Here you can find more info on the core concepts and buzz words that will help you feel and talk like a Cylindo expert!
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit)
A SKU is a unique ID assigned to a product by a store to identify the price and/or product options. This is the term that we use for a basic, single item that lives in our system. It can be any furniture item or any other item. Each base SKU can have any number of options. For example, it can have 10 fabrics and 10 leg types, which results in 20 options. Each Base SKU can have many feature types and feature values. We usually get the SKU name or ID from the customer for all Base SKUs they will order. One SKU can be made of multiple Base SKUs if it is complex. For example, if an arm chair has an ottoman that goes with it, it’s basically 1 SKU with 2 Base SKUs.
Feature and Option Types
This is the type of feature that one Base SKU can have. It can be Fabric, Wood, Metal, Arms, Headrest etc. It defines an attribute of the product (SKU) that can be changed or customized.
Features and Options
Each Feature and Option Type can have many features or values. For example Fabric can be Red, Blue, White etc; Wood can be Oak, Ash, Walnut, Cherry etc. The total number of options defines the tier level that the SKU will fit in.
Feature type & Feature Value
Also know as option type and value is a combination of the corresponding feature types and their values for a certain product. You will need to understand this and use it when you integrate the Viewer on your website. For example, if you have a sofa with SKU ID: 163957, and it comes in 10 fabrics and 5 legs, then a feature type and value combination for this SKU could be: Feature type: Fabric, Feature Value: Red. Feature Type: Leg, Feature Value: Oak. Like this, you can create feature arrays, e.g. [Fabric, Red, Leg, Oak]. This will then be a reference to a full single combination of your sofa SKU, which will represent it in red fabric with oak legs in the viewport.
Variation
Variations stand for the combination of features / options that give specific unique result for a Base SKU. It is always calculated as a product of the different Features / Options. For example if Base SKU can have 10 Fabrics and 5 Legs, the number of Options is 15 but the number of Variations is 50. One Variation can be Fabric Red and Leg Walnut. Another can be Fabric White and Leg Oak.
In case there are any additional concepts, words, or features that you encounter during your work with us, and you find them confusing, please let us know in the help widget below or contact your Customer Success Manager, so they can explain that to you and we can enrich this intro guide as well. We wish you a happy Cylindo journey!