Digital gift vouchers, our major new feature that's ready to serve up
Well, it's been a minute.
It seems like only yesterday that we were getting started on building the next major feature for Easy Eatery. And here we are, just three short months later, with everything built, tested, and ready to go!
Digital gift vouchers are the brand-new feature coming to Easy Eatery, and it's by far the most requested feature to date.
The pitfalls of traditional approaches to gift voucher sales
Several months ago, I was conducting early market research for our platform. I visited several pubs and restaurants to discuss their 'needs and wants' regarding what would make the perfect hospitality website.
The ability to sell gift vouchers online was always at the top of the list—even above table reservations software. Everyone I spoke with wanted to sell gift vouchers but had the same issues.
For example, people would tell me how keeping track of vouchers sold, not to mention redeemed and expired vouchers, meant a lot more admin and paperwork that took them away from their usual day-to-day duties.
They mentioned that posting gift vouchers to their recipients took time and cost money, not to mention the cost of buying the stationary required to create the physical vouchers in the first place.
They also complained about how the stand-alone gift voucher fulfilment services already on the market were sometimes quite expensive, with almost all of them taking a sizable cut of every sale on top of a base monthly subscription.
In short, for almost everyone I spoke with, gift vouchers were desirable, but ultimately more trouble than they were worth.
Fast-forward several months...
And here we are today, with our digital gift voucher tools going live.
We've spent the past few months meticulously designing and building a digital gift voucher solution for Easy Eatery that addresses every single concern raised during our research phase. By doing so, I believe we've created a solution that adds significant value to Easy Eatery for our customers.
When it launches, Easy Eatery's gift voucher sales and management tools will give our customers an effective new way to earn money through their restaurant websites.
With Easy Eatery, you'll be able to sell digital gift vouchers, which are sent automatically to the recipient by email without you having to lift even a finger. What's more? They'll be completely commission free.
A simple but effective approach to gift vouchers.
Getting started selling gift vouchers is a breeze. Simply create your gift vouchers in Easy Eatery, connect an online payment method, and set up your store page—then, you're all set!
We don't believe in making things complicated, but that's not to say we're skimping on options. The vouchers you can sell with us are flexible.
You can set several pricing options and enable a handling fee to offset card processing fees.
Plus, you can set a sales limit to create urgency and a validity period for vouchers sold to ensure they don't sit unused for months.
Once set up, our solution effectively runs itself, as you don't need to be involved in the day-to-day sales of gift vouchers, but still, the workflow for managing orders is straightforward.
- The customer places an order via your website and makes payment online.
- Once payment is confirmed, the gift voucher is emailed to the recipient on the date your customer selected when they placed the order.
- When the time comes, use our redemption tools to easily find and redeem the voucher order.
Easy voucher redemption
To redeem a voucher, search with the voucher's unique code or scan the QR code in the email to redeem the voucher in seconds.
Even with all this in mind, there's much more to the system than I've mentioned today. I haven't even mentioned offline orders or discount codes.
We're not done with gift vouchers, either. We're already working on data export functionality to simplify our customers' bookkeeping.
We're also designing sales analytics tools so that our customers can view the relative performance of their gift vouchers over time and see the impact of discount codes and advertising campaigns on sales.
How much will these features cost?
Digital gift voucher sales is one of Easy Eatery's core features and is included in every Easy Eatery service plan at no extra cost. This is a standard feature that all our customers can benefit from.
And you can rest assured knowing that we won't charge you commission on your gift voucher sales.
All money made via selling gift vouchers — minus your card fees of course — will be your own. The only costs on our side is the affordable monthly subscription on which Easy Eatery is to be sold.
This summer will be jam-packed for us at Easy Eatery, and we can't wait to start!
Paul is the owner and lead developer at Easy Eatery and is also senior web developer at the award-winning Cardiff-based digital creative agency, Blue Stag.
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