Inhaven is a B2B supplier of household furnishings and essentials for vacation and short-term rental homes. Many vacation homes are independently managed, which means that owners don’t have hotel-sized budgets even though guests expect hotel-quality service and hospitality.

Hosts require durable, stylish products that fit their existing interior decor and won’t break their budgets. When the existing product search features were hindering the user experience, Inhaven employed the Advanced Metafields App to vastly improve their website.

The Challenge

Short-term rentals are as unique as residential homes — sometimes even more so. From a mountain cabin to a beach house to a downtown loft, each space has a particular decor and color palette that hosts are hoping to match when they shop for new products.

Additionally, Inhaven sells premium products from top brands, and it was important to the company to effectively market their full catalog with accurate, credible product descriptions.

Color was a particular challenge. A host might want light blue towels, but Inhaven sells marine, seafoam, ocean, and spa blue. These aren’t necessarily optimized search terms, but labeling all of these options as “light blue” would give duplicate product descriptions. There was really no easy way to make products searchable while preserving variant colorings in BigCommerce.

The Solution

Inhaven needed a backend solution that would save time and developer headaches. It had to play well with existing integrations and allow for ongoing updates.

The Advanced Metafields App checked all the boxes. Advanced Metafields uses channels for simple color mapping. By creating a grouping mechanism, customers can easily filter by color, but each product variant still has its own unique hex and product description.

The Results

The Advanced Metafields App saved hours of manual coding and description updates. Inhaven hosts can now search on a streamlined site with a much improved UX.

The user can easily control the filter from the app instead of having to toggle between the frontend and the backend. By using this method, Inhaven created a “setup once, manage always” environment. Store owners can update the color data with no additional dev work.