A 360° virtual tour is a visit to your premises made of spherical photos: the customer turns the view with a finger, moves from one room to the next and taps the shelves to see what you sell. Until recently, making one meant a special camera or hiring a photographer. Today you can take the photos with an iPhone and publish the tour the same day.
This guide follows the real order of the work: first you decide what to show, then you prepare the space, take the photos, connect them, add your products and publish. We use ViewNexo as the example because it is the tool we know, but the advice on light, height and route applies to any 360° tour.
What you need before you start
- An iPhone with iOS 16.4 or later and the ViewNexo 360 app, which is free on the App Store. The Android version is on its way; if your phone is Android, for now you need a 360° camera or a borrowed iPhone for an afternoon.
- A ViewNexo account. The Free plan is free for 3 months and includes 1 business, 1 tour with up to 10 scenes and 10 products. That is enough for a small shop, or to try it before deciding.
- A tripod or monopod, if you can. It is not required: the app has a handheld mode. But with the phone fixed on one point the photos fit together better, and it shows in the result.
- An hour or two with the shop quiet. Before opening, after closing or in the slowest hour of the day.
You do not need a computer to take the photos. It does help to have one for the next step, the editor, where you connect the scenes and place the points: it works on a phone, but a large screen is more comfortable.
Step 1: decide which scenes to shoot
A scene is one 360° photo taken from one spot. The most common mistake is shooting too many: twenty nearly identical scenes tire the visitor and triple your work. Think of the path a customer takes when they walk in, and mark only the spots where they would stop to look.
- The entrance. It is the first image of the tour: what you see when you step through the door.
- Each area with different products. One aisle per category, the shoe wall, the phone display case, the counter.
- The spaces customers want to see before they come. Fitting rooms, a restaurant's terrace, a hotel room, a workshop's waiting area.
- No stockrooms or offices, unless showing them helps you sell.
For a neighbourhood shop, 4 to 6 scenes are usually enough. A restaurant with a dining room, terrace and bar is covered with 3 or 4. If your premises are large, start with the area that sells the most and add the rest later: a published tour with five scenes is worth more than a perfect one you never finish.
Walk the shop with the phone in your hand and put a piece of tape or a coin on the floor at each chosen spot. That way you take every photo without wondering where to stand and, if you have to repeat one, you return to exactly the same place.
Step 2: prepare the shop and the light
A 360° photo has no framing: everything is in it. The ceiling, the floor, the cardboard box behind the counter and the backpack you left on a chair. Before capturing, walk a full lap with a customer's eyes.
- Tidy and clean what you normally do not look at: the floor, the corners, the cables, what is under the tables.
- Turn on every light, including display cases and shelves. A well-lit shop looks larger and the products are easier to make out.
- Avoid strong backlight. A window with midday sun leaves the interior dark and the glass blown out. If you have large windows, try early in the morning or late in the afternoon.
- Arrange the shelves the way you want them to look every day. You change prices and stock later from the catalog without reshooting, but the way the shelf looks stays in the photo.
- Ask people to step out of the space for a minute. The app takes about 30 photos per scene and joins them; if someone moves between one and the next, they may come out cut off.
Step 3: take the 360° photos with the app
Open ViewNexo 360, sign in with your business account and choose the tour the scenes will go into. If you do not have a tour yet, create it first in the dashboard: the tours chapter of the tutorial explains it screen by screen.
- Tap Capture, type the scene's name (Entrance, Aisle 1, Counter) and tap Capture 360°.
- Choose how you will capture: Handheld or Tripod.
- Stand on the spot you marked, hold the phone upright and point straight ahead. The first photo sets the centre of the scene.
- A dot and a circle appear on screen. Move the phone slowly until the dot sits inside the circle and hold still for a moment: the app shoots by itself.
- Follow the dots around, then up and down, until the ceiling and the floor are covered.
- When you finish, tap Review and upload. The servers join the photos into a single 360° image in about a minute, and the scene appears in your tour by itself.
Height and position
Place the phone at the eye level of a standing person and in the place a customer would look at the space from, not up against a wall or a shelf. If you capture handheld, turn the phone on its own axis, as if it were pinned to an invisible pole: what ruins a 360° photo is the phone travelling while you turn, not a shaky hand.
What to do if a scene comes out wrong
Check each scene in the app's viewer before moving to the next. If you see a visible seam, a person cut off or a blurry area, capture again from the same spot. Repeating a scene takes two minutes; finding the problem once the tripod is packed takes far longer. Every detail of the capture is in the 360° photos chapter of the tutorial.
If you already own a 360° camera, you can upload its photos straight to the tour instead of using the app. In which camera to use for a 360° virtual tour we compare the two options.
Step 4: connect the scenes so people can walk through
With the photos uploaded you have several separate 360° images. What turns them into a tour are the links between scenes: the arrows the visitor taps to go from the entrance to the aisle and from the aisle to the counter.
Open the editor from the tour's page. In the entrance scene, turn the view until you see the way to the next room, add a point of type Link to scene, click on the floor in that direction and choose the destination scene. Then open that scene and add an arrow back.
- Always there and back. If there is an arrow from the entrance to the aisle, add another from the aisle to the entrance, so nobody gets stuck.
- Put the arrow where people would walk: on the floor, towards the door or the aisle, not floating on a wall.
- Choose each scene's initial view. Turn the panorama towards the most attractive part of the room and save it as the initial view; it is the first thing anyone arriving at that scene will see.
- Mark the tour's initial scene. Usually the entrance.
The step-by-step with screenshots is in the chapters The 360° editor and Interactive points.
Step 5: add your products and the way to contact you
A tour without points is a nice photo. What makes it useful for selling is that the customer can tap a shelf and see what is there, how much it costs and whether any is left.
In ViewNexo, products live in your catalog, not in the photo. First you create them in the dashboard with a name, photo, price and availability, grouped in categories; then, in the editor, you place on each shelf a point that refers to that category. That is a Smart Shelf: it shows every product in the category with up-to-date price and stock. When you change a price or mark something as sold out, the tour reflects it instantly and you do not have to take new photos.
- Start with your best sellers. On the Free plan you have 10 products: pick the ones that best represent the business.
- One category per shelf or area. Shoes, Bags, Drinks, Desserts: one for each place in the shop where you want a point.
- Add a WhatsApp point next to the till or the counter, with a message already written. The customer taps and the chat with you opens.
- If you offer services (appointments, bookings, test drives, viewings), create them as services and place them where they are provided, with the request-a-booking button.
- An information point with opening hours and address, near the entrance.
The products and categories chapter explains the whole catalog, including importing from Excel if you have many products. And if you want to get more out of the WhatsApp button, read how to sell on WhatsApp with a virtual tour.
Step 6: publish and share the link
Before publishing, open the preview and walk the whole tour as if you were a customer: go in, pass through every scene, tap every point. Then press Publish. The tour lives at a public link that opens in the browser of any phone, tablet or computer, with nothing to install and no account to create.
A tour only brings customers if people see it. These are the places where it pays off most:
- Your WhatsApp Business profile, in the website field, and your status updates whenever new stock arrives.
- Your Instagram bio and stories, with the link sticker.
- Your Google Business listing and your Facebook page.
- A printed QR code on the door, the shop window, the bags or the menu. The dashboard generates it ready to print.
- Your website, with the code to embed the tour.
Every way of sharing, with its steps, is in the chapter Share your tour.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them
- Capturing with people walking around. You get people cut off or repeated. Wait for a calm minute per scene.
- Moving off the spot while you turn. The photos stop fitting together and seams appear. Turn the phone; do not walk.
- Using the iPhone camera's Pano mode. Those panoramas are not full 360° photos and do not work for a tour; use the ViewNexo 360 app.
- Too many scenes. If two scenes show almost the same thing, keep the better one.
- Publishing without arrows back. Test the full tour on your own phone, on mobile data, before sharing it.
- Forgetting the tour once it is published. Keep prices up to date in the catalog, and reshoot a scene only when you rearrange that space.
How long it takes
It depends on the size of the premises and how many products you want to load, but the order of magnitude is hours, not weeks. Each scene takes a few minutes to capture plus the minute of processing. Connecting five scenes with their arrows is a short session in the editor. What asks for the most time is the catalog, and that work can be spread out: publish with your ten main products and keep adding the rest.
If you want to see what a finished tour looks like before starting yours, open the demos by type of business or find your trade in the pages by sector. And if you are wondering what it costs to keep it running, we break it down in how much a 360° virtual tour costs.