We want to encourage your visitor attraction or your tourist attraction to make the most of this new demand for online shopping and online experiences to increase your revenue.
Turning your gift shop into an online store.
For many visitor attractions the gift shop or retail outlets are a great way to increase visitor spend on site by selling memories and keepsakes for the experience on the day. If you don’t have an online store for visitors to purchase gift shop or retail items online their only choice is to make purchases on the day of their experience. By taking your gift shop online and offering your items through an Ecommerce website you’re not only opening up more sales opportunity for visitors, but you could also increase sales from non-visitors. For examples, people browsing for gift ideas online may come across items that you sell in your gift shop such as personalised story books or animal toy sets. Online shopping has become such as huge part of the UK consumers life, that consumers are used to buying online now, and by selling your stock through your website, you can welcome a profit all year round, instead of only when your attraction’s retail outlets are open.
Selling gifted experinces or gift vouchers.
Not only are consumers more used to buying online, but they are also more accepting of new ideas for gifting presents to family, friends and loved ones. Your visitor attraction could welcome increased revenue by selling experiences for visitors to gift. This could be in the form of gift vouchers toward entry ticket prices or a free day pass. This could also be selling additional gifted experiences within your attraction. For example, meet the animals experiences, behind the scenes tour or an afternoon tea in your café. Due to most of the country being on lockdown for so long the gift of an experience is now more meaningful to many visitors than anything, so think about how your attraction runs what special experiences could you put together and sell through an online store for your visitors to gift.
Offer membership benefits all year round.
Depending on the type of attraction you run, be it a museum, a farm park or theme park, you will more than likely run some sort of membership or annual passholder ticket solution. This is to attract loyal visitors and to reward them with discounted ticketing and encourage repeat visits and increased spend on the park during those repeat visits. Usually annual passholders or members benefits only run during the period of time that your park is open understandably that is when they will be visiting your park, but have you thought about how you can keep the attention and engage with customers and visitors all year round? Perhaps your museum could send members sneak peeks at new exhibitions or offer online viewing of new exhibitions included in their membership all year round. If you are farm park, a zoo or safari park attraction, you could keep members up to date about the animals with regular emails or social media posts within a members group. Think about what your park could offer in terms of benefits to a member and what might encourage a member to stay engaged and interested in your attraction, even when your doors are shut and they can’t visit you.
Have you thought about other online channels such as Amazon and eBay?
Online selling is usually done through an Ecommerce website and yes it is great to be able to sell your gift shop or retail items through your website, but have you thought about other online channels such as Amazon and eBay? Both of these online channels allow you to sell to a completely different audience and see that potential customers could find you through item specific searches. By selling your stock through Amazon and eBay storefronts or marketplaces you can sell not only whilst your doors are shut, but 24/7, 365 days a year. Obviously you would have to think about your stock management and your logistics but don’t worry that’s something we can help with.
So there you have it, 4 ideas of how you can bring more revenue into your visitor attraction all year round. If you’re thinking about setting up an Ecommerce website make sure that you think this through thoroughly. If you have a stock control system, finance systems and visitor attraction EPOS system you want these to be linked to your online sales solution. This is where VisiSoft can help. We support many customers with their online sales whether they are selling through their website or Amazon or eBay. We can link directly into your accounts solution and your stock control solution to ensure that online sales and in park sales sync up. So if you’re ready to find out more and start increasing your revenue, speak to one of our experts about booking a demo to find out more information today.
