Transcript: WGAN-TV RELA Booking System with Team Calendar and Getting Paid11085
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WGAN Forum Founder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
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WGAN-TV RELA Booking System and Billing Platform for Matterport Pros with RELA CEO Mike Land | (20 February 2020) Hi All, If you are using many tools to manage your business, RELA simplifies with its "swiss army knife" all-in-one platform. RELA solves these problems: ✓ creating Single Property Websites (branded, unbranded) ✓ getting paid (option to release digital assets when paid in full or part) ✓ delivering digital assets in one place ✓ booking shoots ✓ reminder notifications to client and photographer (and/or 3rd party service provider such as drone) ✓ invoicing ✓ simplify display of pricing ✓ help up-sell Optional Extras (how services are presented) ✓ easily offer different clients different pricing (such as legacy or large clients) ✓ receive deposits ✓ automatically deposit payments to your checking account ✓ accepting payments ✓ providing client with dashboard for all digital assets, invoicing (and more) ✓ couponing (one for all; unique one-time use, expiration date, only work for certain client) ✓ online ordering ✓ online booking ✓ close leads ✓ manage multiple photographers ✓ see photographers' availability in real time How else will you use the RELA platform? Best, Dan Transcript - Hi, all, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder of the We Get Around Network Forum, today is Thursday, February 20th 2020. And you're watching WGAN-TV Live at Five. We have an awesome show for you today, we got the Founder of, excuse me, the CEO of Rela, Mike Land. Mike, good to see you again. - Good to see you. - Mike's been on the show a couple of times with us, talking about Rela. Today's show is Rela Booking System with Team Calendar Sync and Matterport Service Providers getting paid using the Rela platform, so we've got a lot to cover. I think probably just to give the highlights of what we're gonna go over today, is Rela booking a shoot, smart pricing and packaging, getting paid on time with integrated payment and media delivery, team calendar sync and assignments, the photographer's store. We'll talk about some new pricing. And I think, Mike, before we jump in, that's a lot of new stuff to cover since you were on the show last, how about an overview of the web platform from a Matterport Service Provider's perspective? - Sure. I'll share my screen here. So Rela is a platform that lets Service Providers create beautiful Single Property Websites to showcase the media that they've developed or generated for each listing. And we make it really easy and simple for you to also deliver all of that media to your agents. You can create beautiful property websites like this, which are great marketing tools for your agent clients and really something that adds value to your service on top of the beautiful media that you're producing. And it's a great way to deliver the media as well, instead of sending just a zip file that they download and then extract, now you have a beautiful presentation for all of the media that you've created, so your photos, your 3D tours, obviously, floor plans, videos, all of the media that you're producing for a listing nowadays you can incorporate into these property websites. So these are just some samples of our templates, we're got about 20 templates to choose from, we're always updating those to make sure that they're nice and up to date and following current design trends. And then from the backend, it's just built to be a really user friendly system to make your life easier, to streamline your workflow, and make your agent's life easier as well. So that's the quick overview of what Rela's core service is. - And obviously, we saw some Matterport 3D tours there, so it's completely, Rela is completely compatible with Matterport, as well as photos, video, Matterport, floor plans, aerial video, text, maps. - Yup, absolutely. So it's compatible, again, with all of the media that you're producing for a listing, especially Matterport. And we're actually working on some stuff to integrate even deeper with the Matterport tours to just bring more efficiencies when you're creating these property websites and delivering to your customers. But that's for another show down the road. - You're welcome to come back and talk about that when you're ready. So from a Matterport Service Provider's perspective, what you've just covered was a Rela Single Property Website, presumably both branded and unbranded, and then today, you have a lot of new things that Rela has added to the mix to take us through. - Right. Today, we're going to showcase the new platform integration that we're launching or that we've recently launched, which will essentially allow Service Providers to build out their lists of services and products, custom pricing, and let their customers place orders and book shoots directly from their customized order page that will sync through your calendars in your Rela account and integrate directly with your media delivery and make it really easy to make sure you get paid on time. And so we'll go through all of those features here in just a second. So let me share my screen again real quick. So before we jump into the details of the demo, really, the goal with this platform, with the billing and booking system in Rela, was to help solve a couple different problems that we saw when we were doing some research into building a platform like this. Obviously, the number one issue, I think, for Service Providers and any contractors is getting paid on time for the work that they produce and then deliver. And as it is currently, most of the booking systems that are available out there that photographers are using aren't necessarily tied directly to their delivery systems. And so we end up in a situation where the customer needs their media that you produced. And you say okay, go ahead and mail me a check or send me a payment somehow. But here's your media, and then you get the agent who's really busy, and then all of the sudden, you have a lot of accounts receivable building up. And it's tough to stay on top of that and tough to get paid in a timely manner in a lot of cases. So the most basic problem that we're trying to solve here is that. So you've got your media delivery system within Rela. And you can now issue invoices that are tied to those listings. So now, when the customer is ready to download their photos, they'll be notified by this system that there's an outstanding balance that they need to take care of before they can download those photos. Same goes for any videos or any links to the Matterport 3D tours, and basically any content that you identify as wanting to lock down before payment is received, you can do that. The other problem that we sought out to solve, when we were looking at these other booking systems and looking at how a lot of photographers present their services and their pricing, it seemed very busy. You can imagine the example where a photographer prices their services based on the size of a home. And a lot of times, what we were seeing was a list of services which would basically be for the same service, so let's say for a Matterport scan. And they'd have that listed out six to eight times. It's basically the same service, they're just now showing different prices for different square footage ranges. Well, what the result ends up being is you're, information overload for a potential customer, right, they don't know what to choose and they have a tendency to drop off the form and potentially not order from you, right. And so our system is built so that you can display the correct pricing for the size of the home based off of the address that the customer entered in, so that you have a nice clean order experience for the customer. You don't overload them with choices, you offer them the choices that are appropriate for that listing, and they can get through the order process really quickly without too much friction. And really, at the end of the day, that's what you want, you want the order to be submitted so that you have the opportunity now to communicate with that agent, confirm the order time and day, and then go ahead and complete that order and get paid, right. And with that smart pricing and packaging, we also have the ability to bundle your services into packages so that you can encourage your customers to order the set of services that make the most sense together, you can offer discounts on those bundles if you'd like to offer them more incentive, or you can offer them at their true price. But a lot of flexibility there in terms of what services you can bundle and how you can present that to your customer when they're placing an order. So from there, once that order's processing, you're confirming the time and the day, it'll sync up to your Google Calendar so that you have all of that information in front of you at all times, and you can manage your schedule that way really easily. So I guess we should jump right into it. - Great. Take us back onto your screen share, that would be great, I had taken you off of screen share. - Okay. So what we're looking at here is just our basic store dashboard, you'll see this, if you're a current customer, you'll notice this new link to store in your main menu here. And once you have enabled your store and gone through some of the onboarding steps, you'll have access to this dashboard, this will show you any new orders that have been submitted, unpaid invoices, basic dashboard stuff, gives you some quick stats that will compare to your previous month's activity and volume, and any upcoming assignments. So I'll just quickly go through some of these order admin screens, so you can see what those look like, and then we can talk about some of the detailed settings that you can apply to really customize your workflow here. So this is an order detail screen for an order that's been submitted by one of our customers. Let's see if we can find... - Do you want to show an order being placed? - Yeah. Yeah, we'll show an order being placed here, let's-- - Because we're looking at the backend from the photographer's standpoint. - Yeah, we're looking at the backend from the photographer's standpoint, I want to show you this first and then we can demo how an order gets placed. So you can see what the order form looks like. So you'll basically have all of your information in terms of what products they've ordered. You can adjust these products within the order. You can add products or remove in the case that they want to add or add something after they've actually placed the order. You'll see a travel fee that we can automatically calculate when a customer is placing an order based off of your desired travel radius and per mile cost. And then you can add custom line items to this order as well if you need to. We've got our shoot date that's been requested, our statuses. We can go through this in detail a bit more. And the terms of those options here. We've got our agent, we've got the property information, and then we have our invoices and progress down here. So this is what it looks like from the backend. So now let's jump to what it will look like from the agent's perspective. So when you create, when you enable your store in Rela, we're going to give you a secure domain that you can use, all you need to do is connect your DNS settings to create this sub-domain for your primary company URL. So this is the custom booking page, and you can actually customize this however you want, it has a site builder from the admin site, so you can add sections, change the photos, it's basically point and click, drag and drop, really easy to set this up so that it matches closely to your main company website. Obviously, this is just sample content and text here. And so the customer will come in here, enter the address. That's going to pre-fill based off of the Google geolocation results. It will also actually pull the correct size in for that property and set the range here. The customer can change this if they think that's not correct, but what we'll also do in the backend is save the actual size of the listing the customer cannot change, so that you can verify and cross-reference when you get the order in. And then you can, the agent can enter any notes here. You will have the ability to customize these questions down here as well, so if there's specific questions that you know you always need to get answers to when an order is being placed, you'll be able to add different fields there. So let's go to the next screen here. And so I've got packages set up in this demo account, I've got our gold, silver, and bronze. And you can see the array of different services that are included in each package. Again, you can customize this from the backend however you'd like and you can set custom pricing, discounts, and rules. And this, again, is automatically calculating to the correct size or to the correct price based off of that property size. So let's go ahead and select the gold package. And once I select a package, it's gonna automatically switch the customer or the menu to the a la carte options. Any of the services that are included in this package will be indicated as such, but the customer can then go through and add any additional products that they'd like here. Now, onto the scheduling. This is where they're going to choose the preferred day and the preferred time of day. Now, this is a little bit of a different approach than a lot of the big scheduling systems out there where they let you choose down to the minute. We opted not to go that route so that you can really control the expectations of the agent. And we know that shoots run over time in a lot of cases, or you may need to adjust a little bit, so you're giving them the range of time that you'll be there or the option that they want you to be there. And then you can confirm the exact time once you've had a chance to look at the order and determine what time you can be there. And this makes it easy for agents, Because really, they're not having to choose the exact time that they want someone there. So we'll see how that works from the backend when we look at some of the settings as well. So we've got our time and our day here. And then we'll fill out our contact information. - Excuse me, Mike, is the scheduling, is that looking at the Google Calendar to determine when a photographer is available? - It's not looking at the Google Calendar to determine. It's actually using some settings that you configure from your backend and actually, the way that we do this is we ask you to tell us how many shoots you can complete each day, just an estimate, right. And when this order is submitted and you switch the status to accept it and you've confirmed the day and time, that shoot will be blocked off for that day, and once you've reached your limit for a particular day, that day will no longer be available to customers, right. - So if I can do three shoots a day, then when that third shoot is booked on that day, it won't accept any additional, they won't offer that day as an option. - [Mike] Correct. - Now, is that, so if I have multiple photographers on the team, so let's say it's three shoots or five shoots per person, let's say five shoots per person, really aggressive, so if I have two people, I might say 10 shoots are going to be available on that day. - Exactly. And that, again, with that approach, what we, what our goal really is here is to let a customer place the order through you. Because in certain cases, where we're going down, again, to the direct minute and syncing to your Google Calendar and showing availability based off of all of those events in your calendar, you can end up with a situation where an agent thinks that they want a shoot on that day, but they don't see the exact time that they want or maybe they don't see the timeframe that they want, and they just bail from the order form. And so by approaching it from a more general capacity setup, that really opens you up to be able to take in more orders without the risk of agents, again, having this decision making overload where they don't see the exact time that they want and they don't choose it and they don't choose to place an order with you because of that. - So making it super easy from the agent's perspective to say hey, this is the day I want, I prefer morning, midday or afternoon. And then get the order, get the order, get the order, and don't put any friction in the ordering process so that the photographer gets the order. And then it'll be up to the photographer if they need to juggle this day, this time, they can go back to the agent, say hey, thanks for your order, I can shoot that at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m., which works best for you? - Exactly. Again, we consider an order to be a lead, right. And you got to close that lead, but in order to close it, you have to get the lead. And if there's too much friction during the order process, too many decisions for the agent to make, there's a higher risk that you're going to get the lead. So we just want you to get the lead, and then you can, if there's an issue with scheduling or the products that they've ordered, you have the opportunity at least to communicate with them and hopefully close that deal and get the shoot. So that's our approach with this. - [Dan] Okay, great. - So onto the next step, we fill out our information here. Now, if the customer has already registered and they enter in an email that is registered in the system as your client, this next screen will simply ask them to enter in their password. If it's a new customer, it'll just move in through the next screen. We'll create a new customer here. So they can review their order. They can make changes if they need to. If there was a travel fee required because this was outside of the rage that we select in our settings, it would show here. Since it's not outside of that range, it's just not going to show the travel fee. So that's a nice option to enable. And then if this looks good from the customer's perspective, they can click Place Order. And so then the customer is going to receive an email confirming that you've received their order and that you're reviewing and will be in touch with them as soon as you can confirm the date and time. If it's a new customer, the link that's in the email will take them to a quick registration form that will have basically their contact information filled in, they just need to choose a password so that they can log in and view the status and track their order. If it's an existing customer, the link will be an automatic login link, which will take them to their account, your white labeled account, where they can view the status of their order there. So let's jump back to-- - Before you go on, just for clarification on this sub-domain. So I can choose my sub-domain dot whatever my website, no, whatever my website is? - This is your website. It's going to be, right now, it's required that you use the order sub-domain. That's how we give you the free SSL certificate for this order page so that your customer has a secure checkout experience here. So you basically, whatever your white label domain is in Rela, you'll just add a new sub-domain for order. - Ah, okay, so it's still my website. - [Mike] Correct. - And I can do all my marketing and anything I want to put on my website about photos, video, aerial, Matterport, painted rocks, floor plans, et cetera. And then I likely have a button that says Book Now. - Yup. And that Book Now will take them just to order dot your domain dot com. - So it, your goal here is for it to be a seamless experience going from my design, my colors, my website and we haven't taken them off of our website, we've just taken them to the order page. - Correct. Yup, so then they'll see, they'll still see your website in the URL bar here, so we're keeping that user experience consistent. And again, you can customize this page however you'd like, so hopefully, you can get it close to what your current website looks like, so again, that user experience is staying consistent. - I'm geeky but I'm not a tech, so how hard is it for me to set up that sub-domain? - It's actually really easy, it's just one setting that you apply to your domain wherever you purchased it from. We have a help video that will walk you through it. If you're a current Rela customer and you've already set up your white label domain, it's basically the same set of steps or same single step. But again, we have a white label domain setup video that you can watch that will walk you through it, and you can always reach out to our live chat where we're happy to help on the tech side. - So whether you're using WordPress or Squarespace or yet another website hosting platform, there's going to be some instructions regarding the CNAME and how that's set on that particular website or platform. - Yup. There'll be instructions. The video that we have from the dashboard will show you how to do it from GoDaddy. But it's basically the same set of steps with any registrar. So it's very simple, nothing too complicated. - And if we get stuck, we could do a screen share with your support. - Yup, absolutely. - [Dan] Great. - Okay. So I can jump back to our orders here. And again, we're looking at the order edit screen. Any order that needs your attention is going to have this new status here, and you'll see that from your dashboard, from the order dashboard. You're also going to receive an email, obviously, with a notification about this new order that you can click through to get directly to this edit screen. And so basically, you want to review the order, take a look, and make sure that everything looks good. We've got our estimated distance here. - Trouble you just to go back to that screen one more time. So that's based on square footage with a band, a band of square feet. What are the different options here, can it literally be based on per square foot, does it need to be by bands, does it? - It's by, we're using these bands or we call them ranges. You can customize these ranges to whatever you'd like. And if you want to go all the way up to 10,000 square feet, you can do that. - So the key here is it's by range. - It is by range, we don't have by down to the exact square foot calculation just yet. - So it just means that, if the photographer is charging by the square foot literally, it's 2,427 square feet, this will require a little bit of re-thinking to do pricing based on bands. - Right. We will, we can add that feature to the list. It's actually been on the list. I think we saw the immediate need for pricing within these bands more so than the per square foot pricing. But that's something that we've got on the list. So we'd love to hear back from the community if that's a feature that you think would be useful, we can certainly add it in there. - Great, I'd just like to add perhaps one other pricing question related to that. So some photographers will charge a minimum, so it'll be a minimum of X plus then based on square footage. So can that, so let's see. Well, I guess that says it's really going to be, regardless, it's going to be a band. - Right. We don't have that level of price variation in there yet. But we'd love to hear feedback, again, and if there are certain pricing variations or mechanisms that don't exist in the platform and you need them, let our team know. Because really, the plan at this point, since we've done our initial launch, is to put out really rapid updated and releases, feature additions, fixes based off of customer feedback, and that's really the goal. And we have a team dedicated to doing just that. Because we know that we're not gonna get this 100% perfect the first time. We may never get it 100% perfect, but we'd like to get it as close as possible, and we have to rely on our customers to tell us what works and what they need and what we don't have yet. - So as a photographer, I can control what size the band is and how many bands that I have. - Exactly. And so we can go through that in our settings here in just a minute. So we also do have a couple different variations for pricing, so you can do quantity. - I'm sorry, I still want to ask this question. - [Mike] Okay, go ahead. - On the frontend, where the client has placed the order, and the client has decided, somehow there's some magic that suggests what size that property is. And if the client overrides that and picks something that's less, do we have an opportunity to add a disclosure statement of some sort that says final pricing will be based on actual square footage? - You do have the opportunity to incorporate your own terms and conditions that the customer has to agree to before placing the order. So you could certainly include that in there. But that's a good idea, if we want to make that a little bit more front and center, we can certainly ask someone to-- - I would probably want that, just so someone's not trying to game our system here, everybody's honest, but if they had a chance maybe to underestimate, we want to tell them that's fine, but the final price is based on actual square footage. - Yeah, and what we've tried to do in-- - And it's another priority, and this is also, excuse me, is also on metric, so I presume we can specify those bands in either square feet or square meters. - Yes. Square feet or square meters. - So we can actually change that text sq ft to square meters. - [Mike] Yup. - [Dan] Okay. - That typically, there's only one portion or part where that shows to the customer, and that's on the initial address entry form for that order. We've tried to design that order form so that they're only seeing the pricing that is appropriate for that size and not giving them really an upfront opportunity to switch between sizes and see what the pricing is, right, we don't make it really apparent to them. And that was one of the problems that we see in existing scheduling systems, where you're listing all of the prices and an agent just maybe just chooses the cheapest one, thinking they can get around it. So we've tried to design it in a way so that we can minimize that scenario. But certainly, adding it into your terms and conditions would help, and then potentially, we could show a more prevalent message there if you wanted to enable that. Down here in the property details with the address, this will show you the range that was selected, and then the estimated square foot that we pulled in the background so that you can compare those. So if you do see a discrepancy here, then you can adjust the pricing and communicate that to the agent. So if we were to adjust this pricing here, the pricing in our order would change. - And is the estimated square footage, is that based on heated space? - That's pulling from public record, different sources in public record that we cross-reference. And so whatever is displayed or showing in that record, that's what we're pulling in. So I don't have an answer on if that-- - I ask because, if that was heated square feet, it's close enough that if we scan the garage or carport or porches or patios, it might put us over the actual square footage. - Right. And I guess it can vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction where they have different classifications for square footage of the home. So yeah, it's, that's what we're getting from public record. So I could, I don't have an answer in terms of if-- - I think all of this, what I'm looking at so far is awesome. I just would make that suggestion, is to give us a text field on that pricing page so that any call out that we would want to say, such as actual billing, actual invoice, invoice based on actual square footage or actual square meters. I can't imagine I'm the only one that would want to have some control over saying something upfront rather than just burying it in terms and conditions. - Right, okay. Yeah, that's a good suggestion. So we'll just get through this order workflow process, and then we can go jump into the settings here and talk about those. So basically, once you've got this order, if everything looks good to go, you can change this to accepted. There is also another status that we allow, which is accept on deposit, which would then allow you to basically put this order into a pending state until the customer pays a deposit amount. And you can set whatever that deposit amount is. And once they've paid that, then the order would switch to accepted. So that's useful in cases where maybe you work with an agent who tends to reschedule a lot or no show, and you want that particular agent to pay $50 to secure that time slot on your calendar, you can choose this option. We'll just go ahead and switch this example order to accepted. We'll need to confirm the date and time. So since they've chosen that this should, that they want you to shoot in the morning, we're going to pre-populate this start time to that general time for you, and then you'll confirm. You'll see in a lot of these confirmation forms, send confirmation email to the customer. When you have this checked, this will always give you a next form that will let you customize that email, so don't be scared to use this, because it's not going to just automatically send out an email without your approval, yeah. So we'll go ahead and confirm that. And then this is the email that we can send to our customer. We've updated our email template editor as well to make this easier. So you can see exactly what the email looks like from a design standpoint. And then you can just click and start typing if you need to make changes. You'll see these little blue boxes here. Those are replacing details when this email is sent with the order-specific details for you, so that you can set these up as templates and you don't have to type it each time. And you can also customize what those replacement items will be in this email. So a pretty nice feature there, and it'll save you some time just in terms of making sure you have the right messaging for each email that gets sent out. - Awesome, and I think I heard you say I could save as a template? - Yeah, so you can save or you can customize these templates, all of these email templates in our email settings. - And I could have more than one, so I could have one for one client, one for another client? - Not at the moment, the email settings, or sorry, the email templates are right now set up for each of the email events that will occur. But they're not necessarily set up for each client. - So I could have one template saved per whatever the communication messaging. - Correct. You can always customize it before you send it as well. If you know one customer wants you to always say hi John before you send it, you can do that. But yeah, we don't have it set up to be customized for specific customers at the moment. So we can go ahead and send that. And now our order is accepted. When you've produced the media for this order, you've got your photos ready, you can start adding these to this order, you can click add media to order, it will bring you down here. In order to do that, you need to create or select an existing property site. We'll create a new one here. The property site in Rela is really the holder for all of that media, whether you do the full property website or you set it to media delivery only, that's how we're going to organize and store all of that content. And so you can click Add Property and then start uploading your media. We'll choose an existing property here. And then that will show you basically a progress tracker of all of the content that you have uploaded so far for this listing, so we've got 53 photos, we've got some flyers and brochures created, we've got our agents attached here. And so once you're ready to actually deliver this and take payment, you can go to this Generate Invoice button and generate the invoice to send out. And you can set a full invoice or you can do a partial payment if you want. So let's just set this to full invoice. We'll send a notification to the agent, letting them know that this invoice is ready to be paid. And there we go. And then we can send this off, the customer will get that email. And when they've accessed their dashboard and they'll see this property that they're assigned to, since we have all of these components set to be locked until payment, they won't be able to download any of these or even publish the property website until they've paid that final balance of 204.29. - Are they seeing a watermarked version? - No, they're actually seeing a message that will show up that says there is an outstanding balance on this listing, you'll need to pay it before you can access this download. Any of the photos that they see before then will be very small in size, so they won't actually be able to use those. - So they do see something, they just-- - Oh yeah, certainly, they'll be able to see and review it, and when they're ready to download the full size or any size of those photos, they'll be able to do that. - Okay. We didn't go look at the Single Property Website, but that's essentially what you were creating there, is the deliverable being a Single Property Website. - Right, the deliverable is either a Single Property Website or the media itself, Because we do have the option to do a media-only property, which essentially will prevent you or the customer from actually publishing the website and using that so anyone else can see the website. When it's set to media only, the logged in customer can still see the website, you can see the website. And we do that for some upsell opportunity, because they can then choose to publish that website and you can set a price that you'll charge them to convert that to a full working website and they can pay for that and then publish it automatically from there. - So even the Single Property Website generated by Rela can be a digital asset for purchase. - Yeah, absolutely. - So just for clarification, the real estate agent could say, no, I just want photos, video, Matterport tour, aerial, but not the Single Property Website, not sure why not, but there could be a price associated with it or nor, and that's totally up to the photographer. - Yup. Yeah. So yeah, there may be, again, cases like you just described where agents just don't think they want a website. But the nice thing about Rela's system is that they're still going to be able to see it and see how awesome it is, and they're hopefully going to say, actually, I want this website, and when they go to try to publish it, then they'll see that notice if you've set a price for them to unlock that. - Ah, awesome. - And when you do a media-only credit, those credits are less expensive than the full property credit. So if you don't need the website, then you can use the media-only option there. - Okay, so it sounds like the credit we'll discuss when we get to pricing. - Yeah. So the, once the invoice has been paid, your customer can pay directly with their credit card information, which they can save on file through their account. It'll automatically unlock those downloads if they paid the full balance. This will be set to paid and will show a green tag here. But if, for some reason, the agent couldn't pay online and maybe showed up at your office with a check, you can set this invoice to mark it as paid and add a note on how that was paid and the date that it was paid. - So I could image you're using something like Stripe for accepting payment, and so when a credit card is entered by the agent, we as a photographer, we never see the credit card number if that's all, so we don't have to worry about the security associated with accepting credit cards, Because that's done in our behalf by Stripe? - Yup, yeah, so we integrate right now with Stripe as our payment processor. They handle all of the credit card encryption and storage and PCI compliance. Rela doesn't even touch any of that either. And so that means, yeah, you as the Service Provider won't have to worry about any of that, Because Stripe's going to handle that for you and they're a great platform for payment processing. So again, you do have the option to manually mark that as paid, or as soon as they actually, as the customer pays through the portal here, that'll be marked for you automatically. Everyone gets a confirmation email and you finish your project. - Now, I may be jumping ahead here, but even generating an invoice, I can control the logo, the address, the phone number, to some extent, the design, and that becomes yet another template? - So we can log in and show you what that looks like. Right now, it's a pretty basic invoice. Let me switch over to our customer test account here. So they'll be logged in to their backend on your white labeled version of Rela, so they're going to already see a ton of your branding. And so I'm gonna switch over here to our demo agent account. And so this is what I'll see as the agent, so I can see my outstanding invoices. I can see any orders that are in progress or have been completed or any draft orders that I've created that I haven't submitted yet. - I would imagine that those invoices are sent by email in addition to showing up in the agent's dashboard. - Right, so the, you can send an email notifying them that the invoice is ready to go. It will provide a secure link that will log them in, so that they basically land on this page, they can review the order and the invoice, and then they can click pay. And so this is what their invoice will look like from that perspective. Let's see if we can... - And the agent wants to get a PDF backup for their billing systems, there's a button in some place, Download, boom, great. - And so this is what the invoice looks like, it's got your company name, the listing information, shoot date. So all of the details for the property, and then obviously what they've ordered. The payment status, payment date, all of that. - So this is awesome, looking at this, I mean, you haven't even completed your demo, but I would say, for any new photographer that's just starting out and is thinking about, oh my gosh, how do I send an invoice, how do I collect an invoice, how do I keep track of, there's a lot of things that you're providing as a turnkey one stop solution here that is solving a lot of problems. - Yeah, certainly. I mean, again, the most basic level of collecting payment, but tying that to delivering your media is there from the start. And so it's a huge value add and a benefit to be able to incorporate that into your workflow. Because again, the process of trying to collect payment for anyone in any industry is always a little bit of a grind. And we want to separate out the human component of that, where you're the one having to call the agent and say, hey, you need to pay me. Instead, the systems going to do that for you, systems going to say, oh, looks like you have an outstanding invoice, before you can download these photos or access this 3D tour, you need to pay it, and that's it. - And if I choose not to accept payment upfront, is there a series of dunning notices and those are controlled in the templates as well? - Yes, so that you can send out and schedule notifications if there's an invoice that's past due and set a frequency that you want to send those out to. - Mike, when you, when Rela was first thinking about adding this feature of being able to collect money, so you defined that there was a problem, did you do some research on this, which turned out it was really a huge pain point for a lot of photographers, was getting paid? - We did, I mean, we did some pretty informal research. We talked to a lot of our current customers who've been with us for a while and we know have been, all the way at the top of the spectrum are really successful huge teams down to the single operator who is just starting and anyone in between. And the overwhelming feedback was my systems are all separate, I'm delivering my media and doing the property websites through you, I've got this other scheduling component that I have to keep track of, and then we have our invoicing system. But it's just such a hassle, I'm paying a ton of money to keep all of these platforms active with my plan. But at the end of the day, I still am not getting payment on time, right. And so again, that was one of the main problems and pain points that we wanted to solve with this, just to make it really easy to get paid before your customer receives the materials that you've generated for them or the services that you've provided for them. - When you did some of your research, did scheduling, did that pop up as a big problem in terms of a lot of back and forth, there's... - Scheduling was probably second down the line. And it didn't seem like it was, it almost seems like it was such a bad problem that people just accepted it, right. Because there's all of these scheduling systems out there that a lot of the feedback was the customers wouldn't use it, they would call in and place the order on the phone or send them an email and expect the photographer to place that order and keep track of it. - I would get texts. - [Mike] Or get text messages, right. - [Dan] Very short text messages. - Right. And so we said, okay, well, why is that a problem? And then we started looking at the systems that were being used for scheduling. And there were some that were really old and bad, so obviously, no one wants to use that online form, right. And then there were some that were really new and flashy, but they were so complicated. And again, they were, there was, in one case, we saw 50 products listed. But in reality, there was probably five or six variations per product or service. So there were really only 8 to 10 products being offered. But you're now giving an agent 50 choices that they have to make before they can complete the order. So while that's a new and flashy system and integrates with your calendar and does all of this and you can schedule a shoot at 8:32 p.m. on a Tuesday, but that's too much, it's too much for the agent to have to decide on when they just want you to come out and shoot some nice photos and scan a Matterport tour and give them a property website. - For those clients that still send me a text, can I go in and place the order in their behalf? - Yes, absolutely, and that, we just had-- - [Dan] Or do I have a backend? - A pretty eye-opening conversation with one of our long time customers with that, and we were talking to them about using our new scheduling system and they said, well, customers never use our online scheduling system as it is. They just call in. And now we're in a situation where any of the orders that were called in weren't necessarily accepted, they didn't accept the terms and conditions Because our terms and conditions form is online. And so we had no way to get them to agree to those terms and conditions. We said, well, if you use our platform, you can create the order on behalf of the agent, you can send a confirmation email once you've done that, requiring that they go in and basically confirm the order that you've taken over the phone is correct before you can actually make the final confirmation on that order. And in that process, you can have the agent agree to the terms and condition before that order is accepted, right. And so that will solve that problem for you, Because that-- - And am I doing that on the backend? - Yeah, so you can, let's switch back over if you, I can share my screen if that's okay. - Yes, please. And then, if that's a client that has never set up a Rela account, am I setting up an account for them? - Yeah, you would just basically set up their account from the Manage Agents section and enter their information. And once they're in there, you can place an order on behalf of that agent. So we can go into our store dashboard and then click Create New Order. - So part of the goal here is if, under the existing workflow, if a client is texting or emailing or calling, that the photographer can still move it through the Rela platform in order to perhaps train the agent that this is really a much better way to interact and order and have everything on there and all in the same place. - Yup. Yeah, and so again, if let's say someone texts you or calls you and you're on the phone with them, you can pull up your dashboard here and create this order for them. And so we saw on this, let's go back a step. This agent selection screen is only available to admins, obviously, the agent who's placing the order wouldn't put that in there, unless they're a new customer filling out their contact information, so we can select any agent that we'd like and then move through the steps here. And so you can place the order on behalf of that agent, and again, once you've done that, you send a confirmation email letting the customer know, hey, we've placed this on behalf of, or placed this order on your behalf. Please click here to confirm the items in this order and the services that you basically told us you wanted us to provide for you. And once they confirm that and agree to the terms and conditions if you've chosen to have that step in there, you're good to go. And that will get them in the habit of looking at an order from their dashboard and having the ability to make changes and look at the scheduling options and things like that. Then hopefully, the next time they want to place an order, they think it's easier just to do it from their dashboard. - Well, I do have more questions, but they may actually get answered as you go through your presentation, so I'm going to try and hold off my questions until you feel like you've gotten to the end of what you'd like to show. - Okay. So I'd like to show just some of the configuration options here, just so I can help everyone understand what the customizations and options are that exist. So this is our order settings form here, this is something you want to take a look at when you set up your store. We've got order form visibility, which you can set to admin only, so this would set it so that you're the one creating these orders on behalf of the agents and the agent, even if they had an account, wouldn't be able to access the order form. That may be nice to have while you're testing so that you can create some test orders and see how it works. Existing customers would show the order, create an order button for your existing customers who log in to their dashboard here. And then this new and existing customers will give you the opportunity to set up your public order page that we've demoed at the beginning of the video. So in most cases, you'll probably want that new and existing customers there. This is our media only convert price where you can choose the price that a customer would pay to convert a media only tour to an actual working property website. We've got our travel and mileage. So you can enable a per mile cost and a minimum distance to start charging. So if you're-- - Is that available in kilometers? - Yeah, you can set your account to either metric or mile here. And so if you're fine traveling within a certain distance and not charging that, you can set whatever you want to start charging. And then the custom line item that will show on the order, that's the title of that line item. And then your origin address. That would just be where you generally start from each day, where you would start calculating the mileage. This is where you can adjust your ranges that you'd like to price your products at. Again, you can customize this however you'd like. But you don't have to use this, and we'll look at that in a second when we're looking at the product setup. There are some other options in terms of pricing. And then here are just some defaults so that we can ensure that any order that's placed will have these locked items here. And then terms and conditions, if you want to include those, they'll be notified that they're accepting those terms and conditions when they click place order. - [Dan] Cool. - On the order form, once we've got our product set up, this is where you can control what this order form looks like. Basically setting the sort order of these products and how they show up. And you can view what, if you're using the price, the square footage ranges, you can see what the price differences are at those different ranges just to make sure that you've got it calculated correctly. If you don't have packages that you've set up, that's fine, this package tab won't show up. It'll just simply show the a la carte items here. Again, you can control the category positions here by just dragging and dropping. You can edit products directly from here. You can disable the categories, so if you don't do video and maybe you don't do aerial, you're just doing photography and 3D walkthroughs, you can choose to disable those. We don't let you add any custom categories at the moment. This really should cover hopefully all of the services that you're providing. - Floor plans? - That would maybe go into Add-Ons or even 3D walkthroughs. - Ah, okay, so Add-On does let me add another item to bill for. - Yeah, Add-On is a category. It's not going to let you add an additional category, but you can, when you have different services or products that don't fit into these, you can put them into the Add-Ons here. - Ah, okay, so presently, Rela doesn't offer the opportunity to offer additional specific services that would show up like photography, video, 3D walkthroughs, aerial. - Yeah, I mean, really, we're just not letting you add additional categories here, right. These are just categories, this is how you organize the services that you're offering. - It is interesting, Because I would say that many Matterport Service Providers have things about them that are unique. They might offer actual staging, they might offer we'll clean up the place, I mean, it's really amazing, but a lot of agents don't stage the space. So the photographer will actually put that down as a line item that says, we'll stage your space. - Right, yeah. I think we were approaching it in the sense that you could add those additional Add-Ons, or those services into the Add-Ons category. - So I could have multiple Add-Ons, and so I might have a Zillow 3D tour. And that would show up as one of the Add-Ons, and then from the real estate agent's perspective, they're going to check that box that says oh, yes, I'd like a Zillow 3D home tour, I'd like virtual staging, whatever it is. - Right. Yeah, so you can add as many products and services as you want. And then you can decide which category they fall into, right. We, the reasoning behind us not opening up the ability to add custom categories here initially really came to the point that we wanted to help keep this order form really clean and simple and avoid information overload and decision overload. And sometimes when we tend to, or when we open up the custom free for all, we see just, we see a ton of variation that we don't recommend in a lot of cases, right. So we want to help control what this looks like. But again, if you feel like we're missing a category or you really need the custom category, let us know, we certainly will listen to those suggestions. - I guess I'd probably have a mini debate or in floor plans. But I do suggest to photographers, I say hey, you really can overwhelm your client, and when you give them so many choices, it's like, oh my gosh. It's like, well, that's just too much, as opposed to floor plans are so inexpensive to get a third party to create that, I mean, first thing I would recommend to most photographers, even if the client hasn't ordered floor plans, deliver floor plans and say, thank you for your business. By the way, if you'd like to do that on your next order, this is what I charge for it. - Yeah. And that's where the packaging could come into play, we definitely suggest setting up some packages so that you can, if you're going to offer the 3D tour gold package where you offer a Matterport tour and video, include the floor plans in there, right, and let them see the value of that here. - For clarification, Mike, just one more time, on that 3D walkthroughs, do I control the wording of 3D walkthroughs? - No, right now, it's set to 3D walkthroughs. - Okay. So even if I wanted to say Matterport, digital twin, or if I wanted to say my particular brand name for what I call a Matterport digital twin, I don't have that option. - Not from the category perspective, but you can certainly change the product name. - Product name, okay. (Continued...) |
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(Continued from above) --- - So when they click on 3D walkthroughs, any of the products that you have in here, any of these product names here, you can change the title and the description and everything in here. This is purely meant for just quick organization. - So on that a la carte, you're going to get into this, but I guess the question would be, if you're doing aerial photo or aerial video and you charge by the second or you charge by, do you have that flexibility or is it no, if you want aerial video, it's a flat fee for the property, there's no, it's not size dependent? - You can set any product to charge on the size of the property, so any of this can be set up to do that. So let's say aerial video. If you wanted to, or sorry, aerial photos, we wanted to charge on a square footage basis, we can do that by simply editing that product. - Ah, awesome, okay. - And then changing that to the prices that you want to charge there. Now, we don't have a per second calculation pricing in here for that. But what you could do is you could add multiple products in here where you have aerial video 30 second is $20 and aerial video 120 seconds is $50, and you can add those variations in here if you'd like. - That's clear. - Let's see. So you also have the ability, you'll notice here, to set a product to be priced based off of quantity. So not every photographer will price their photography services or scan services based off of square footage, they'll do it off of quantity for some services. So you can choose this quantity option and then set the quantity and then the price, the total price for that quantity bundle, right, this is the total price, not the price per, but the total price. So you can offer quantity-based products. - I noticed tax, is there a table some place to update tax? - Oh yeah. So tax. You can enable that, and that will let the system know that you are charging sales tax for that and will automatically calculate the sales tax based off of the location. So we have all of those live tax tables in the backend, so you don't have to mess with it. - So Rela is using a third party solution based, to take that property address and say, based on that property address, here is the city tax, the county tax, the state tax. Whatever it is that gets taxed for sales tax is being calculated, and does that mean you also are remitting the tax on behalf of the photographer? - No, we're not remitting the tax, we're just calculating and showing that in the order. We don't do any of the tax processing or reporting for you, so you'd have-- - Photographer's still responsible for submitting tax to the appropriate agency. - Right. And you'll be able to export all of your orders and show what was, what sales tax was applied onto what. So you have that at the end of the year to be able to do that, or at any time, really. And not every product should be taxable, not every product needs sales tax applied, it depends on different jurisdictions and states. - Are you doing tax just for US or for other, outside US? - So we're actually working on the tax stuff for Canada at the moment, we have soft launched this to our customers in the US. You can access this right now if you're a US based customer and you want to use this platform. Within the next couple weeks, we'll have Canada ready, the tax component for Canada is the last thing that we're working on. - Okay, cool. - So this is the order form setup. So now I should just quickly jump over to the Manage Products page, because even before you get here, you'll need to set up your products. - Great, I was looking for a table, so this is-- - Yeah. I skipped around a bit. This is, again, probably one of the first steps you want to get through. So we'll set you up with basically these demo products when you create your store, when you enable it. So that you can just see the different variations and how you can set up products here. You'll certainly want to make sure you change these and customize these. Because obviously, our pricing probably isn't where you want it to be. And then certainly add your own products and services, and again, you can add as many products and services as you want, categorize them. Our suggestion is to keep it clear and concise and not have too many products that you're offering. Focus on the core products that you offer and make those available for your customers to place in an order. Again, we want to avoid this decision making overload. So just keep that in mind. We're not putting any restrictions on what you can add and how many you can add. That's just our suggestion. - I'm confused a little bit. So let's say that I've selected the silver package. And the silver package includes HD images and aerial photos. So as an agent, I've selected silver package, that's what's in the silver package. Then everything else is going to show up as an Add-On? - Yes, so all the other a la carte, or all of the other items that are not included in that package will be available as an a la carte choice. - So if a photographer has five different services and two of them are in the package, the bundle, then there'll be three other Add-Ons offered. - Right, correct. - And so part of what you're trying to do here is actually get away from this table being shown to the client, which is what some photographers are doing, is having the entire laundry list of every product with every size with every price being displayed, which is an overwhelming, where all I want to know is for my house is 2500 square feet, how much is photos and video going to cost, boom, here's the number. Oh, by the way, here's the upsell opportunity for the a la carte. - Yup, exactly, that's the goal. So yeah, once you've got your products set up and you've got your pricing all squared away. Again, you can, on this price per option, you can do quantity, square footage, or just a flat fee. Once you've got this set up, you can go to your packages, and this is where you can create your packages. So you can add as many packages as you want here. Let's click on the gold package. So there's just a few things you got to set up here, obviously, you want to put a description in for the package, maybe letting them know if there's a discount or an incentive for adding that package, it can be whatever you'd like. We're not going to explicitly show them without or automatically what the discount is that you're offering here. We wanted to leave that up to you so that you can either show that or not. And you would just put that into the description. You can choose what type of discount you want under the package pricing option. So you can do a percentage discount, you can do a fixed price discount. So whatever you added to this package will be that price. Or you can do a dollar amount discount-- - And so for clarification, if my silver package is photos and video, and that comes out to $350 a la carte, I could select for my silver bundle a 20% discount, and it would be 20% of my a la carte pricing. - Correct. And you can see that here in the summary. We've got our original price for all of these products here. And then what the package price is based off of that discount. And so that will take into account any products that you've set up for the per square foot pricing, even for the quantity pricing. You can always check to see what that price will be based off of the square footages here, just so you make sure that it's showing correctly. And then on the quantity products, you also have this nice feature where, on a package, you can let a customer choose the quantity of products that they want within the package. Or you can set a specific quantity for that package, right. Let's say if they're going to order the gold package, well, they have to, they're going to get 50 products here, right, or sorry, 50 HD images there. You can set that so they can't change it. But if you wanted to be a little bit more flexible, you can set that to allow them to actually choose it in the order form. So some flexibility there. And then, of course, drag and drop to sort the order of how they'll show in the actual order form there. Another cool feature that we've got here is what we call pricing rules. And this is a feature that came out of our beta test around, a lot of photographers, when they first got their start, made a sweetheart deal with maybe one of their first big clients and said, you know what, we'll do this for 20% off of, or 100 bucks, right. And five years later, they're still a great client, consistent, they're doing every listing with you, and you still want to honor that pricing, you can set that in these pricing rules here. And so you can assign an agent from your list here. And then you can assign the products that they're going to get those discounts on. And so you can put as many products in here as you want. And you can change what type of discount it's going to be, so if you wanted to do percentage off, if you want to do a fixed price or a dollar amount off, you can do that there. So a nice feature to have. - That's an awesome feature, Because I suspect there are many, many photographers who are feeling stuck, they have a public rate card, about half of, my impression is, about half of all photographers have public rate cards, they have a public rate card, they want to increase their pricing, but they're concerned about their existing clients seeing that pricing. You've essentially taken that out of the equation by enabling the appropriate pricing to be displayed to that early on customer. - [Mike] Right. - So that would give the photographer the opportunity to have actually multiple rate cards depending on the client. So it might be, hey, these are all my clients that signed up in 2019, but our new pricing starting January 1, 2020, we actually had a price increase. But now I have an easy way to manage the price increase that's going to be displayed to any new client. And then any previous client that may have either been a discount off of a certain price or a fixed amount by product, is that correct? - [Mike] Yup. - Fixed amount by product, it gives the photographer the flexibility of having a different scenario. So I could imagine, oh, this is an agent, they do four listings a year. Well, I want to maybe treat them a little bit differently than somebody who's doing 12 listings a year or somebody that's doing, that's a brokerage and they're doing 100 listings a year. So if I'm working on the brokerage and I've cut a special deal with them, I can manage all of these prices unique to their account. - [Mike] Correct. - You've given a lot of thought to this. - Yeah. I mean, that was, one of our first beta testers is a big photography company, they've been around forever. I mean, that was, they said, we have to have this, I mean, we have these customers that we got our start with and they've helped us grow our business to what it is now, a nationwide company. We have to honor that pricing. And so we said okay, that seems really reasonable and a pretty cool feature that I don't think a lot of other platforms have. And so let's put it in there. And so we were already working on the packaging and discounts at the time, so we were able to squeeze that one in. In the upcoming feature update, which we already have planned for the next two weeks, we'll also add the ability to enable general discount codes on products or the entire set of services too, so you can set a discount code that they can enter into the order form, you can set expiration dates on that. You can determine which products it applies to and all of that stuff, so pretty much this same interface. - Help me out with discount codes, Because there are so many different permutations of codes. So let me see if I can just rattle off in my mind. Here's a code, anybody could use it. - [Mike] Yup. - Here's a code, anybody can use it, but it expires on March 1st. - [Mike] Right. - Here's a code that's limited to the next 10 people that use it by March 1st. - Yup, it's, yeah, it'll be the full robust discount code-- - Here's a code, it can only be used once. - [Mike] Yup. - Here's a code that can be used once and I can name what that code name is, and it can only be used once but it's got to be used by March 1st. - Yeah, there you go. Yeah. - Am I missing any permutation? - We'll likely have the ability to assign discount codes to specific customers. So in the case where you don't want to set up a full pricing rule for that to apply each time, you could set a one time discount code for a new customer and-- - Ah, so if I give the code to Jane, she can't share it with John. - Right. And that would only apply to her account, yup. - [Dan] Awesome. - Yeah. And then the timing one is great too, the expiration of discount codes, you can do seasonal promotion codes and things like that. - So quantity of codes, timing of codes, naming of codes, partitions of codes. - Yeah. All the codes. - Okay, and that's, today is Thursday, February 20th 2020. So you're expecting this next update to arrive... - Early to mid-March. - [Dan] Okay. - Yeah. All right, so that's the products and the packaging and pricing. We have staff accounts that you can add as well. So if you are working on a team, you can add as many staff accounts as you want at no cost. The options for the staff accounts just in terms of access, you can limit a staff account to only see assignments that they have been assigned to, and they can only access the upload forms for the media of a particular property where they won't have the contact information for the agent if you don't want to give it to them. And they basically can only do one specific task here. The full support account would have access to your full agent list and set of listings that are in your account. And they can perform tasks on behalf of those agents and listings. They won't have access to your store settings or your dashboard here, you can still assign them to tasks where they can see from their assignments dashboard what they're supposed to be working on. But just a more trusted account level there. - So for clarification, if I had five photographers and four of those photographers, I didn't even want them to know that Rela was the platform behind my booking, they would never know. - Right, the limited support accounts will be on the white labeled version. The full support accounts are going to be-- - I've got a little bit of concern that a photographer might be with me for a year but then go out on their own, and I don't necessarily need to disclose that I'm using the Rela platform to manage the entire backend. - Right. Yeah, the limited, if you choose them to be limited here, they'll basically be put into the white label side and won't really have any access or see that it's Rela. The full support is someone that obviously you work with and trust and can access those listings and agents. And you can add as many of those as you want. The limited support account is great for vendors that maybe you work with or team up with for certain specialties that need to take care of tasks but, again, don't need full access to everything else. And that will come into play on your orders, and I skipped over that when we were looking at the order demo here. So let's pull up this quarter form, or sorry, this order edit. This, when you add your staff accounts, anyone that you've added here you can assign to orders. So you can assign different tasks or you can assign them to the entire order. And we have this option here for scheduling on an entire order basis or a per line item basis. - So if there is a, one photographer is doing photos and another is doing aerial and the third is doing the Matterport tour, that's actually possible to assign individuals in the Rela platform. - Yeah, so we'll switch this scheduling option to per line item. And now I can assign each of these tasks individually. And I'll choose my shooter that I want to be out there or my staff member. I can see their assignments that they have on their calendar. And as long as they're connected to their Google Calendar, you can also see any external events that exist in their Google Calendar, so if they've got a personal day that they're out and not available, you would see that here. Right now, I only have my holidays synced here, so we can see those. And then you just click a day, choose the timeframe, and they're assigned. And so that will sync up to their Google Calendar. And will show also on our calendar here. - I imagine they're getting email notifications, and they're not only getting the notification that the time that you've completed their assignment that you've assigned it to them, but I imagine you have some ticklers going out a day before, day of. - Yeah. So we'll have, you have the ability to set the timing for those reminder emails on a per order basis, and if you want to set 24 hours ahead of time and day of, you can do that. And so they'll receive an email automatically with-- - And then are those notifications different than what the agent receives? - Yeah, those are certainly different, the content will be different for the email, Because it's going to be more-- - Is the tickler timing different, so the client may get this schedule of ticklers and the photographer may this schedule of ticklers? - Right, yeah, you can do different timing per different user, if you want. And so you don't have to assign each task here. Maybe one of these is brochures or something and you don't need the assignment, you can do that. So that's nice, again, if you're working with multiple people on a shoot, but if it's just you for the shoot, you can switch it to entire order and then assign, assign yourself or assign someone to the entire order. And in that Google event, they'll have all of these items here, or in that calendar event, they'll see all of these items here. And so just a nice option to have, you can always change this at any time and you can set your default setting to ensure that you have the most used setting applied to the orders by default there. So once you've been assigning people, you can always check on your calendar from your Rela dashboard. And you can see the assignments that exist here. You can click on the assignment and it'll show you the details. You can pull in those external events. So if you wanted to just look at one person's calendar and show those external events, you can do that. You can go by week, day. So just an easy way to keep track of what's going on here. You don't have to connect to Google Calendar, you can use this calendar if you want, but we will be offering the ability to integrate to Apple Calendar and Outlook eventually, but Google is what we have available right now. And then on that subject, on the schedule settings, this is where you would set up your calendar sync, some default settings for the per line item or order scheduling. And this is where you'd determine how many shoots you can handle each day. You also set which days you are open for business. So if you only wanted to work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you just have those selected, and then in your calendar, your booking form, those days would be the only days that would show during the week as available. And then onto the email settings, this is where you can modify the different emails that come from the system. And it will give you a nice description of when this goes out and why it goes out, and then again, you can customize these to say whatever you'd like. You've got a preview of the email, you can send a test with an actual order. So when you're getting this set up, definitely suggest creating a few sample orders, and then you can send out tests to see what those orders, sorry, what those emails look like that you're setting up, just so you make sure you've got the, all of these replacement tokens correct and things like that. And then finally onto the payment settings, this is where you connect to Stripe. In order to generate invoices in the system, you will need to be connected to Stripe so you can actually create an invoice, that doesn't mean that, again, that you have to process every order through Stripe. But that's the only way that you can actually create invoices, Because you still will have the ability to change the, manually change the status on the invoice. But we need to have it connected to Stripe before you do that. - Yeah, I would just interject there, for those that are not familiar with Stripe, it is awesome. We Get Around Network uses it, and it is such a powerful tool to have money collected and deposited to your checking account. And it's like autopilot, it's just, this whole process of electronic bill payment, presentment, accepting payment, deposits, really, it's just magic. And I imagine, I don't know, I think we might pay X pennies per transaction plus it might be 2.9% or something. It is totally worth it of all the operational steps that you no longer have to do versus accepting a check and all the physical things that you're doing accepting a check. Or even worse, if you're manually somehow taking a credit card, which is crazy if you read anything about the rules and regulations about, what would you call it, PCI-- - Yeah, PCI compliance. You don't want to mess with that. - Yeah, there's a lot of things you don't know and you don't want to know. And the easiest thing to do is to have a third party collect money for you in order to keep you totally compliant and not have to worry about security breaches and notifications and all kinds of crazy things that could trip you up. - Yeah. And they handle a lot of your reporting at the year end for taxes, and we've been using Stripe to bill our normal customers since day one and they're amazing. I wouldn't, I would never think of switching to any other platform. They're priced the lowest at this point, I think, there's no one priced lower than they are. And they're just, they're really easy to use. They got a nice user-friendly dashboard too. Setting up an account with Stripe is really quick and simple. You just fill out your information, describe your business, and you should get approval really quickly, within 24 hours, I believe. And it doesn't cost you anything to have a Stripe account if you're not processing transactions through it. - There's no monthly fee, you just, you simply pay every time you get money. - Right. Yup. Okay, so the last thing here is this is, these are the assignment, this is what you've assigned out to different people here. For your staff accounts, when they click that the assignment has been completed and they mark as complete, but it'll actually go into a review status for you and it'll notify you that this has been marked for review, you can take a look at it and then mark it complete as the admin if you want. So basic task management there. And I think that's about it. You've got a start guide and help docs that you can reference if you get stuck on any steps or have questions about certain features, you can always reach out to our live chat if you need help. We're happy to do a live screen share walkthrough or just answer any questions or take feedback and comments from you at any time. That's about it for the store demo. We hope everyone gives it a try and we hope you guys like it. - So I had a couple thoughts here, Mike. So is the real estate photographer using a third party to do aerial that simply fit into, that was an assignment of another photographer, just happens to be outside the company. They have no privileges to see anything beyond what they've been assigned to. So this essentially, Rela enables using a third party solution to do the notifications, just like you would somebody who's an employee on your team. - Exactly. - So if you're using independent contractors or yet other companies to deliver the service, they're getting notifications, just like they were a member of the team. - Yup, absolutely. - So I was trying to write down all the different pain points that the Rela platform solved. So I think I was going to just summarize here. I think you wanted to talk about pricing, but before we get to, is pricing next? - Yeah, we can go through-- - Before we get to pricing, I just wanted to just cover the pain points. So first is getting paid. So if you're a photographer and you're not getting paid or you're having trouble collecting, you simply set up the delivery of your digital assets once you get paid. - [Mike] Yup. - Second was scheduling. If you're presently doing that by phone or text or email or a note passed to, whatever it might be, you could still do that if you want. But really, you can now empower your client to do the scheduling. And even if they choose not to do the scheduling, you can still begin the process of training them that it really is a better way for them to schedule, because they get the benefit of a dashboard with a Content Management System. And so they can find all their digital assets all in one place, all their invoices in one place, everything is in one place. - [Mike] That's correct. - And oh, by the way, if they forgot, they needed the pictures for the job that was delivered three weeks ago, they can still presumably go back to that job and get the pictures re-delivered. - [Mike] Right. - So scheduling. Third was invoicing, so if you're doing the invoicing yourself or you're using a particular software package for invoicing, that's built into the platform. - [Mike] Yup. - So it takes care of invoicing. I think four were reminders. So maybe you're just a sole photographer and you're good about it, it's your business so you're not going to miss your appointment. But as soon as you start adding independent contractors, you probably want to start doing reminders for them. And then you have this added challenge of, well, are they available? I mean, I can think about that, for We Get Around, the low tech solution is sending off a text, client wants to shoot 10 a.m. on Thursday, are you available? Okay, waiting, he's in a meeting, I'm waiting for him to get out of his meeting in order to text me back in order to accept that. Now I can just simply look at his Google Calendar and see, oh, yeah, he's available or he's not available. I got to train him to be really good about keeping his calendar up to date, but as long as his calendar is up to date, I can be on the phone with the client or receive an email or have the order come in and immediately just assign that to that independent contractor photographer. And then boom, the photographer gets a notice, you're scheduled for 10 a.m. on, and presumably, it's adding it to their Google Calendar as well. - [Mike] Correct. - So it's adding it to their calendar, it's sending them the reminder at the time of the booking, and I probably set up to send them one the day before, and I probably set up a reminder that morning. And then these reminders are not just for my photographer or for me, but also for the client to remind the client that you've booked this date and time, I mean, how many times you have, you show up, the client's forgotten. So you really, when that happens once, you are always either texting or emailing to a client. And now that's built in, I presume, I haven't asked you, but I see a little bit of smile, I'm just guessing that texting is coming. Can't hear you. I lost you on sound. Try it now. No-- - Yes, texting is coming. - I saw a little bit of smile, just enough to think that that might be coming. - Yeah. That's coming platform-wide for notifications to agents when they receive a lead from the property websites all the way through the scheduling system. We're working on that right now. - Yeah, awesome. I imagine your product person is just off camera cringing a little bit, oh my god, we just committed to, yeah, yeah, you're looking at the person, we've just, you want to give us a date? - No, I can't give you a date yet. - [Dan] Ah, come on, Mike. - It'll be this, how close are we to the end of the quarter here? It'll probably be towards the end of March. - Okay, end of first quarter 2020, product person's cringing off in the background, but how exciting is that, the text, that text is coming. So you've taken care of reminders for the photographers and the client. And then accepting money, that, I mean, that, even that's a pain point if you're a photographer and you, whether you've been out in the field dealing with square, trying to get paid at the time of shoot because you wanted to say, hey, before I shoot, I want money. Well, you've just eliminated that step, because at the time of the order, you can have them, photographers are all different. I mean, We Get Around, for example, we don't charge until after we've delivered everything and the client is totally happy. That's our, we charge a lot of money, but for the client that gets that white glove treatment, that's how we do payment. But I know there's photographers of all ends of the spectrum of I want to get paid in full before I show up, I want a deposit before I show up, I want to get paid before I deliver my digital assets to you. I'm not that concerned about my Matterport tour, Because I can always disable that in the background. But if I'm sending you photos, I know as soon as I send you the photos, I may be chasing after you. So you have that flexibility in the platform. I think there's also, I think I also saw one more pain point was I'm using all these different tools for all the things I've described. So I'm using a tool for scheduling, a tool for getting paid, a tool for invoicing, a tool for reminders, a tool for accepting money. And so all five of those things that I've just mentioned are all part of the Rela platform, so it's all in one Content Management System. And in fact, I think we're at a sixth one as I keep writing these things down, is the delivery of digital assets. I imagine that's all over the board of how photographers do that. For us, it's been Dropbox. And even if we're using Dropbox, we're still delivering the Matterport tour separately. So it's, things are all over the place. And I know we've always gotten that call from a client that says, hey, you remember that job that we did? And I got to be really organized about our Dropboxes in order to be able to go, oh yeah, that, organized by client, organized by date, I can find that needle in the haystack. But not only am I finding the needle in the haystack, I could've empowered the client to find what they needed in their dashboard. - [Mike] Exactly. - In their Rela dashboard. So I think I've counted six, were there any other problems that the platform's solving? - Yeah. The way that you present your services and products when you're asking a customer, a new customer especially, to place an order, right. The ability to show the correct pricing based off of the home size. Or even if you're not using that method, just to have a nice clean order form that looks up to date and modern. - Yeah, you spent a lot of time on this, and this is so awesome. So instead of if you have five different services and you got five different sizes, you got a grid of 25 different prices. Then add on top of that the bundles that you might have, and it literally is overwhelming. So now you can bring people in, you don't even have to present, and you don't present your a la carte, you just present your packages, even if a package only has one item in it, you could do that. But this way, it's a little bit easier to do things and maybe three. So here's three packages, bundles, and then here's some Add-Ons. - [Mike] Yeah. - So you solve that problem, I don't know what we would call that, price simplification or something? So some place in there about reducing friction. There was the piece I talked about payment, there was the deposit. So if you're the kind of photographer that wants to get some money, and I imagine you can control that by account. So I think you covered that, you have a client that is notorious for-- - No showing or canceling-- - Not showing up. And you want to get paid. So that's awesome. And I think I'll mention even at this point, Mike, is that we've done two previous shows with you and we didn't spend much time, you showed us at the top of the show a Rela Single Property Website, but we actually did a show, Getting Started with Rela for Matterport Service Providers, and we did another show, Rela Single Property Websites and One Click Flyers. So for our audience that wants to see those shows, the easiest way to find them is go to the We Get Around Network Forum, WGANForum.com. There's a tab up at the top that says Training U, the tab Training U, and it has all our shows. And these shows from, that we've done with Mike are totally free. And they happen to be in a format that makes it super easy to consume the content. We use a platform called Teachable, teachable.com. I encourage you to download the Teachable app. And that way, while you're on the go, you can consume these two previous shows, we'll have recorded this show, this show will be in under the WGAN-TV Training U as well. You could go get all three shows, watch them at your own pace, and the Teachable app keeps track of where you are in your video so you don't have to keep making a mental bookmark or where did you leave off. So anyway, you'll find all three shows under the, at the We Get Around Network Forum, the tab up at the top right, Training U. And then just search for Rela. I know we're going to talk about pricing, but there's still one other thing, I just wanted to go off to the, to one page here for a second and ask you, Mike. I just want to run through these features and just double check that we've covered them. Payment processing, smart product pricing, custom discounts, calendar sync. White label we didn't actually talk much about. Did you want to touch on that? - Yeah. Currently, any photographer account is white labeled. So you can essentially sell these, sell the property websites on your media delivery platform as your own, and agents aren't going to see that, it's built by Rela, right. So you have your own custom white label domain, you have your own logos. All of the communication and emails will have your brand and logos and your email instead of Rela's, so the whole platform is white labeled for you. - Awesome. Locked media until paid, if you want to exercise that, great easy product packages, you discussed that, staff accounts, team calendar, mileage calculator, secured checkout, custom order form, assignments and tasks, integrated with Stripe, integrated workflow. So that's really awesome, you actually covered everything, that's amazing. And okay, so how much? - So the storefront Add-On is 25 a month, and that includes all of the features that we talked about today. We're also announcing a new pricing option for Service Providers and real estate photographers that's going to be less expensive and a little bit easier to bite off if you're just getting started. Our current plan, our photographer pro plan is $99 a month. 's starter plan is going to be $49 a month. And with that, we give you five media deliveries free each month. And then you can purchase additional media credits as needed. So that's going to be a plan that we're giving early access to to the WGAN community. So you can sign up and sign up for that plan now. Again, that's going to be more geared towards photographers who are just getting started or photographers who are really focused on media delivery and don't do a ton of property websites. You still will have the ability to create property websites. But we're not forcing you to have those credits each month on the property website, so like the pro plan. - So for clarification, the $49 a month, that's, We Get Around Network Forum members get early access to that. And that includes five media deliveries, so in my mind, I think of that being a Single Property Website, both branded and unbranded. And then whatever assets that I'm delivering as part of that, photo, video, aerial, photos, aerial, floor plans, map, et cetera. - Right, so it includes everything, even the custom brochures. It does not include the actual published property website. So if you do a media only property, that means you're not going to utilize the actual property website. But you can convert that to a full property if you want. And that's where that automatic credit or automatic conversion fee would come into play if your customer wanted to use that. - So I'm confused, is that included for the photographer in the $49 a month and I get five media deliveries, does it include the Single Property Website? - It does not include the Single Property Website. - How much is that? - So those credits are $18 a piece if you want those. You can convert those, if you convert it to a website, we give you back your media credit. And so that's where the upsell comes into play. - Sorry, I totally lost you. - So if you do a media-only property, that means you're not going to utilize the full property website, which requires a property website credit. The media-only credits are cheaper than the property credits, the full property website credits. So it's a less expensive option to just deliver the media to your customers who don't want a website or if you're not selling the property websites or including those in your service. You don't need to pay for a full property website there. - Okay, so how much is media-only? - So we give you five free each month, and then additional is four dollars each. - Four dollars each, okay. And in fact, I think I want to do this, if you don't mind, let me share screen here. And just, I want to just take... Incidentally, I just happened to call up the We Get Around Network Forum page that's promoting today's show. I do want to let you know that we'll put the show in this discussion as well. And I had mentioned earlier about the Training U is where you'll find stuff. So if you want to check out the Rela website, it's relahq.com, relahq.com. And this is where you can come to see some more examples of live demos, this is a discussion, I would say. Here's where the, you're going to see that the pricing for anyone today as a photographer, as a pro photographer, is $99 per month. - You'll need to switch to the photographer tab. - Thank you, forgive me. Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup, thank you, thank you for clarifying that. So here's the photographer pricing, and I think, Mike, what you've said today is for We Get Around Network Forum members is early access to the pricing. And that's going to live at this page right here. And I don't even think that that's been updated yet, hot off the presses. So if you just type in RELAhq.com/WGAN, on this page will be the pricing of the $49 a month, including five custom deliveries. And then, if you want extra deliveries, they're $4 per property. And if you want to actually have a, deliver a Single Property Website branded and unbranded, those are $18 each. Now, there's one other website to take everyone to, is this is the photographer's page. So this is, this page, a real estate agent presumably would not see, this is a page for us as photographers to see everything that Mike has taken us through today. It's at https://RELAhq.com/photographer-store, so, https://RELAhq.com/photographer-store. And Mike took you through these different pieces of it, the booking a shoot, the invoices, getting paid, smart pricing and packages, team calendar syncing and assignments. These are all the features that he covered. And then, ah, here's that $25 a month, start your free trial. I think what Mike is asking us to do, Because this page is not public yet, if I'm not mistaken. - It's not public, and we'll also put a link to this page when we update the pricing on the special We Get Around page. So you'll have access to do that from-- - Yeah, and if Mike does anything else that's special for We Get Around Network Forum members, you're going to want to come into WGAN. That would be great. We hit all the websites. Mike, is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should've asked you? - I think we covered it all. But really, again, our goal is to build a booking system built specifically for real estate photographers. So we've tried to incorporate a lot of those features and tools in there. We love customer feedback and suggestions and feature requests, so feel free to let them fly once you start testing the system out. And as long as it's a valid request, it's pretty likely to get in there. And we're excited for everyone to try it out. - Awesome. Mike, thanks so much for being the guest on the show. - Thank you for having me, good to see you. - You bet. So we've been vising today with Rela's CEO, Mike Land, based in Newport Beach, California. We have been recording the show, again, it'll be on the We Get Around Network Forum, if you have missed any portion of it, we'll also be, again, under that tab, WGANForum.com, go to Training U, see the two previous shows, and today's show will be in there shortly. Thanks again, Mike, I'm Dan Smigrod, Founder, We Get Around Network Forum, you've been watching WGAN-TV. # # # # # |
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Hi All, You can save a ton of time in your workflow with RELA for Photographers Storefront Add On. Happy holidays, Dan |
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WGAN.INFO/RELA Special Offer for WGAN Forum Members ✓ Free WGAN-TV Training U (in Matterport) 1-Year Membership when you sign-up for RELA Photographer + Storefront Add On using the We Get Around Network affiliate link: WGAN.INFO/RELA ✓ email me your first paid RELA receipt: DanSmigrod@WeGetAroundNetwork.com Dan |
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