Though it may not seem like it, a virtual shopping basket is a powerful tool for growing your revenue. Find out how in our blog.

Encourage multiple bookings with the eola shopping basket

Of the many upgrades made to the eola booking widget in our recent redesign, one of the most important additions was the shopping basket.

In this article, product manager Jamie outlines the challenges involved in bringing our shopping basket to fruition, and most importantly how you can use it to grow your business.

What makes eola’s shopping basket unique

As much as possible, good product design is about guiding the user without ever getting in their way. Though it may not seem like it, a virtual shopping basket is a powerful tool for growing your revenue. Just by keeping the door open during the booking process, you can encourage your customers to explore what you have on offer and book more sessions or lessons in one go.

More than most e-commerce businesses, experience businesses and activity centres require a lot of information upfront from their customers. Alongside choosing what to purchase, customers have to select dates and times, sign disclaimers and question packs, and potentially invite other attendees.

The eola shopping basket, which is featured as standard in the eola booking widget, caters to all these variations. It automatically handles multiple types of products and services, from preset activities to customisable rentals and vouchers, multi-activity passes, and membership products. And customers can use it to purchase individually discounted items, with no fuss.

Crucially, it manages all this as part of a booking flow that remains intuitive and straightforward for your customers.

Your customers are on the hunt for unforgettable experiences, but these don’t have to be just one-offs. By allowing your customers to check out multiple activities at once, the eola shopping basket opens up a whole new realm of possibilities when it comes to setting up activities and other products you’d like to offer.

For example, perhaps you want to encourage people to stay on your site for longer. You could promote two activities together - alongside a morning session, they could book a second, complimentary activity for the afternoon, and enjoy a whole day out.

Or perhaps you offer an introductory session guiding beginners in the basics of an activity. If they catch the bug, you could direct them towards a multi-week, multi-session course to level up their skills.

Without a shopping basket, marketing these scenarios would require asking your customers to check out multiple times in a row. The eola shopping basket makes all this, and more, easy.

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Of the many upgrades made to the eola booking widget in our recent redesign, one of the most important additions was the shopping basket. In this article, product manager Jamie outlines the challenges involved in bringing our shopping basket to fruition, and most importantly how you can use it to ...

Virtual shopping baskets: Drive multiple bookings

Rentals are now live in the new widget, enabling you to maximise return from your equipment.

We have hit the ground running this year, and have been hard at work adding new features to help our partners. With big plans in place for 2022, we have already laid a lot of the groundwork for the year to come.

Rentals are now live in the new widget, enabling you to maximise return from your equipment by allowing customers to rent items when they are not being used for activities.

Our design looks to make the complex simple for your customer, and is inspired by the simplicity brought by the likes of Trainline and Skyscanner to booking time-bound items.

Since launching the new widget we have made multiple minor additions and upgrades based on your feedback. These include:

Improved controls to configure your activity/rental

We have been busy working on our membership product, still in Alpha development. Memberships are a powerful tool to help you retain customers and grow your revenue, and are a vital part of many business's revenue stream.

Membership trial periods: Attract customers by letting them try out the benefits of your memberships. At the end of a specified time period, they are automatically moved onto the paid plan.

Membership fees: Include a one-off fee when a membership is purchased. A simple but impactful way to encourage customers to keep their membership rolling over.

Upgraded cancellations: Improve how you manage your customers, cancel immediately with no refund, immediately with a pro-rata'd refund, or, cancel at the end of the billing cycle
Notifications: Keep track of any payment issues with notifications to alert you when a customers card details cause a failed payment.

As per our roadmap, we are working on some large scale upgrades to the business platform. We will keep you updated as these are rolled out. Alongside this we have a series of smaller new features that should be launched shortly.

eola update | Rentals are now live in the new widget, enabling you to maximise return from your equipment.

January product update

Rentals revamped

Widget updates

Memberships update

What's next

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