Online orders and shopping cart
Last updated: August 6, 2024
An online order is created when a customer purchases multiple items or activities at once from your website. The online shopping cart feature allows customers to purchase multiple items or activities at once from your site.
Before your customers can start creating orders, you’ll need to have the online cart feature enabled in your Dashboard. This will automatically add a shopping cart to your booking process, so that customers can keep browsing until they’re ready for checkout. To turn on this feature, or if you want to talk about if a shopping cart is right for your company, get in touch with FareHarbor Support.
How does it work?
Browsing and adding to cart
When the online cart is enabled in your Dashboard, your customers will automatically see an “Add to cart” button after making a selection.
They will then be taken to a checkout page, where they can either complete their reservation or keep shopping.
Suggested item flows will always be shown while using the online cart. Suggested items are a series of relevant or popular activities that are being recommended to a customer once they add an activity to their cart. Learn more about suggested items here.
While browsing your items, the customer can return to their cart at any time by clicking the cart icon at the top right. Or, if the customer switches back to browse the website, they can also easily return to their cart by clicking on the cart icon in the bottom right hand corner. They can also make changes to each booking individually before completing the checkout process.
Checkout
When the customer is ready to make their purchase, they will simply enter their contact and payment information as they would on a normal booking, and click Submit + Pay.
Note: When purchasing multiple items together in an order, the customer pays one charge. This means they will see only one charge on their credit card or bank statement.
Once completed, the customer will receive a confirmation of their order. Any item-specific details (such as directions, tickets, waivers, etc.) will be included in the confirmation.
Managing online orders
Bookings made with an online shopping cart get entered into FareHarbor just like they normally would, with the order information located at the top of the booking overview. Any other bookings included in the order will be shown in this section.
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Suggested Items, Dashboard Orders and Online Cart
Overview:
Suggested items, online cart and dashboard orders are three FareHarbor features that are very interconnected. Continue reading to learn more about how they work together and how to properly set them up.
- Suggested items are a great way to promote other items to customers. They can be included in confirmation emails, or in a customer’s shopping cart (if applicable).
- Dashboard orders allow users of the dashboard to backend group multiple reservations together, think of it as a backend cart function.
- Online shopping cart is the only feature of the group that relies on suggested items and dashboard orders to function as intended (to increase online bookings!). Online shopping cart cannot be enabled independently while orders and suggested items can. Online shopping cart allows other items to be booked during checkout, after checkout (with suggested items) and anytime through the dashboard backend (with dashboard orders).
- Additionally, not all companies are suitable for the online cart feature. If a company is not the best fit for cart, and the feature is turned on without thinking critically, it can hurt conversion rates. Before setting up cart it’s best to examine the company and dashboard layout to better determine if they are a good fit for cart.
Suggested Items
To set up suggested items, follow the steps below. To learn more about suggested items, check out the Suggested items help page.
To set up suggested items:
- Enable feature in the settings section of the dashboard
- In the booking flow section of the dashboard, create a thoughtful suggested items flow that displays either relevant or popular activities. In other words, instead of simply adding all of the company’s activities to the flow, take the time to narrow down a list of more applicable items.
- Add confirmation notes to the suggested items flow. Note: confirmation notes should always be a quick call-to-action that will catch customers attention.
- Attach suggested items flow on either the dashboard level or item level. Suggested items can be set up in your overall Dashboard settings, or in individual items’ settings. Item settings will override the default settings, if used.
- Add the new feature to company’s dashboard admin note
Dashboard Orders
An order consists of multiple bookings purchased together by the same contact. Like bookings, you can take a variety of actions on an order, such as adding payment or sending an email.
To set up dashboard orders, simply enable feature in the settings section of the dashboard and add the new feature to the company’s dashboard admin notes.
Online Cart
If a client qualifies for cart, you will need to enable Online cart, Suggested items, and Dashboard orders. In fact, it is absolutely critical (for conversions and user experience) that if online cart is enabled that the other two are enabled as well.
To determine if a company qualifies for cart consider the following:
- Companies that do qualify for cart include; round trips, rentals where the equipment is the item (not duration), companies that sell a variety of items such as tours and rentals and dashboards with memberships/multiple passes.
- Companies that should not qualify for cart include escape rooms, tour companies selling exclusively tours or dashboards with only a handful of items. Again, this is always case by case but this is why it’s so crucial to evaluate every company that requests cart enabled.
Note that when you enable cart, take the time to do it right and get all the info from the client. It’s important to ask questions regarding how you should set up the suggested item flows.
Helpful questions to ask:
- What is most often booked together?
- What items are the most popular overall?
- Do certain “suggested item flows” change based on the season?
- Note: Best practice is to have no more than 4 items in a suggested items flow.
How to enable online shopping cart for a company
From the company’s Dashboard, type
Shift+,to go to the advanced settings. Under Bookings, check the box next to “Online cart”, “Suggested items”, and “Dashboard orders”, then click Save.
- Create a suggested items flow of either relevant or popular activities. This flow will be featured in ‘Suggested items’ once a customer adds an activity to their cart. All suggested items flows will be created in the “Booking Flows” section of the dashboard. This flow should not be more than 4 items and should be a series of relevant or most popular activities.
Once the suggested items flow has been created, you will need to add a cart note and confirmation notes. Cart and confirmation notes should always be a quick Call-to-Action.
Attach the suggested items flow to the settings level “Suggested Items” section. To do this, navigate to Settings > Suggested items. This is the most effective/efficient way to ensure that all items inherit a flow. If client wants item level flows, you can add item level too. Item level suggested items will override what is being displayed on the Dash level. Item settings will override the default settings, if used. Always keep in mind that if you are using item level suggested flows, you still need to attach a suggested items flow dashboard level too. This way if they add items down the road, those new items will automatically inherit the dashboard suggested items flow.
- Add the new feature to company’s Dashboard admin note.