Next Generation E-Commerce

I've been working in and around attraction ticket sales for the last 30 years. Recently I've spent a lot of time thinking and discussing the future for ticket sales, particularly online. There has been a huge change in the way we as consumers transact which was only accelerated by the pandemic - just look at your local high street to see hard evidence of this.

This article looks at what next generation e-commerce is and what that means for a Visitor Attraction

E-Commerce in Other Markets

Amazon, Expedia and almost every clothing retailer I've ever used (I'm looking at you Charles Tyrwhitt) have been doing a huge amount of work to get the internet to work for them. They are harvesting huge amounts of data and using this to 

• Attract new customers
• Simplify online transactions
• Increase average order values

All of this leads to increases in revenue generated online of somewhere between 20% - 150%. 

Obviously we can see from any High Street or Shopping Mall that some of this is substitution, people are electing to purchase online rather than in a shop. So what does this mean for the world of visitor attractions?

If you Build It, They Will Come

The majority of attraction websites and e-commerce solutions are focussed on providing information and processing transactions as efficiently as possible. Some are good at this - far too many are, shall we say sub optimal?

Just like Kevin Costner in "Field of Dreams" today's focus in the world of Attraction e-commerce is all about creating a process for people to use when they are at the site, not on doing everything possible to attract customers to the site and using everything we know about them to make the experience personalised and relevant. 

Online Competition

As attractions we often have conflicting ideas about competition. Working with fellow attractions to bring more people to the area (destination marketing) is great. However when the guest is here we need to do everything we can to get them to be my visitor first. In this scenario, your website is your front door. When a guest is there they are ready to commit - don't put barriers in their way otherwise there's every chance that they will go elsewhere. 

This is why it's so important for attractions to start looking at their e-commerce offering and make it as slick and simple as possible.

Next Generation Features

• Mobile First, the Attraction Website Survey tells us that around 80% of visitors are using a mobile device. Your website and most importantly your e-commerce solution should be built to work on a mobile first. It will still be perfectly usable on a desktop which is not always the case when it's desktop first with a responsive / adaptive change to mobile
• Data Driven, you should have the ability to change the behaviour of the site very simply according to how people are using the site. Does a pink "Buy Now" button converts at a higher rate than a blue one? Do you even have the ability to test the different options? You should be able to get into the cycle of test > review > repeat without needing to call on developers or agencies to help
• Personalised, if you know something about the visitor, use it! At it's simplest, if the visitor is a season pass holder - don't try to sell them a ticket, they already have one. As you become familiar with the concept you'll naturally come up with more options and potentially even start to change your product offering. Is the visitor local? If not can you offer accommodation? Does the visitor have a history of gourmet food searches? If so do you have a gourmet offer you could promote. Again use data to test and review
• Conversion Optimised, do you know your current online conversion rate? Astoundingly there are still e-commerce providers that don't support full tracking via Google Analytics, if you can't measure it you can't improve it. 
  Improving your conversion rate from the low end of the industry benchmarks (around 1%) to the average (around 3%) is without a shadow of doubt, the quickest, most cost effective and most impactful thing you can do to your bottom line this year.

Final Thought

If you're not doing these things today that's fine - you're in the same group as the majority of the Attraction World. If you don't have a plan to do at least some of them before your competitors then here's your call to action! 

Obviously we can help - just drop me a line