Increase your turnover with our vouchers!
Did you know that voucher sales make up a large part of turnover for many experience providers? And did you also know that it’s a piece of cake to set up a voucher shop with bookingkit? In this article we tell you everything you need to know about marketing your vouchers successfully and boosting your business significantly.
Exclusive benefits of selling vouchers with bookingkit
What is the most popular gift in Germany? No idea...? Well... it’s Vouchers! If you offer vouchers in addition to your regular offering, you optimise and increase your potential turnover. Vouchers can be purchased any time, and are particularly popular during public holiday seasons. So, if you provide summer experiences you could, for instance, balance out seasonal fluctuations around Christmas. In a nutshell, these are the biggest advantages of selling vouchers through bookingkit:
You get your money straight away! Vouchers can only be bought in bookingkit through Online Payment and the turnover made is available to you immediately in your trustee account. There is a good reason why we don’t offer your customers Cash Payment when they buy a voucher - if they pick Payment on Site payment option, they could use the voucher before they actually paid, as the voucher is sent to the buyer in the order confirmation.
You can either sell single purpose or multi-purpose vouchers. If you sell several services or products and the place of delivery of the items or the provision of the services has not yet been determined, you can sell multi-purpose vouchers that are free of VAT. In this case the VAT will be added only at the time of the voucher redemption. Your customers buy so-called value vouchers whenever they purchase one directly from one of your experiences or as a generic voucher.
As you may know, most vouchers never get redeemed. This could be the case for 50% of all the vouchers you sell. This is easy money free of VAT!
You can choose from lots of different designs and even use your own voucher template in bookingkit. You can make your voucher business look crisp with our Voucher Configurator, and leave the competition behind.
How do I set up a generic voucher?
First things first: Do you sell single-purpose or multi-purpose vouchers?
If you sell several services or products and the place of delivery of the items or the provision of the services has not yet been determined, you can sell your vouchers free of VAT, which is of course an immense advantage considering many vouchers never get redeemed . If your services or products do not fulfill criteria mentioned above, then you shall sell single purpose vouchers.
You can easily set this up in your bookingkit account under Account > Company Data and also determine the tax rate for your single-purpose vouchers:
Both types of vouchers are depicted with their respective VAT rates on all invoices, you only have to determine it once here and you are ready to go!
Now, how do you set up so-called voucher shop?
As you may know already, two buttons appear for each of your experiences: “Buy A Gift Voucher” - here your customer can acquire a voucher for defined price levels at any time - and “Book now” - here your customer chooses from available Dates and books a binding Date directly.
Now, what exactly is a generic voucher? Put simply: your personal voucher shop with bookingkit! To set it up, you merely add an experience without a defined date, so that only the “Buy A Gift Voucher” button is shown. We recommend you set up your voucher shop on your website in a way that makes it easily noticeable.
And this is how it’s done - in just six easy steps:
Under experiences click on Create Experience.
Name the experience, for instance “Voucher” or “Voucher Shop” and add a catchy description such as “The perfect gift for any occasion”. Fix the Category and add a maximum number of participants, e.g. 50 - this makes it possible for your customers to buy multiple vouchers at a time!
3. Define brief highlights – e.g. “Can be redeemed for all our experiences”.
4. Upload an image of your experience - to suit the season, if possible.
5. Set various price levels. Perhaps at this point you are wondering why your customers cannot set the value of the voucher they are buying hemselves? There are good reasons! People generally tend to go for lower voucher values. Of course, we do recommend that you offer lower as well as higher voucher values, e.g. 20, 50, 100 & 200 Euros.
6. When specifying your prices, you can also set directly whether your customers should also see other values in the checkout. This can be useful if you state the value of your product (e.g. € 27.99) in the regular prices, but also want to offer your customers other standardized values:
Your customers can buy voucher with these values directly in the checkout:
Our easy-to-understand tutorial sums it up for you:
Set vouchers' validity period
Under Account > Company Data, you can set the validity period for your vouchers. This applies to both online purchased and manually created vouchers.
The duration of the vouchers is always technically regulated from the date of sale. However, a change only affects newly created vouchers. After the adjustment (if desired), we can apply this once for vouchers that were sold before the rule change, so retroactively. This would also adjust the validity from the date of purchase for old vouchers.
Please note that in Germany, vouchers are generally valid for three years from the end of the year in which the voucher was issued!
And this is how it looks like on the voucher:
Embedding the voucher shop in your homepage
Your generic voucher is now set up, next step is to place it on your website in a way that is visible to your customers right off the bat!
First of all you have to fetch the respective HTML in bookingkit. Simply log in to your bookingkit account and click on Sell > My Widgets. A guide on how to integrate the widget into your website can be found here.
Now all you have to do is add the HTML code to your website. We give some solid practical tips on how to link the voucher shop to your own homepage in the respective article.
Practical tips
To sum up: with our promotional coupons you can launch fantastic temporary promotion campaign. You can increase revenue on days that usually lag behind, acquire returning customers with the After-Sales Email or target particular groups, such as students or mothers. In this case, we also recommend taking advantage of newsletters through free newsletter apps.
You may have heard about our Voucher-Configurator. We cannot emphasise often enough: use this opportunity to personalise your vouchers - your customer loyalty will improve significantly!
Making refund in form of a voucher is also a lucrative idea!
If you want to learn more about different types of vouchers and coupons, then please follow the link, we got your back!
By default, the sale of vouchers is always activated when creating a new experience. If you do not want to sell vouchers for an experience because it is a one-off special event, for example, you can deactivate the voucher button directly in the price details.
