The challenge
Achieve 20% online sales in 2 years
What makes users happy now?
Buy a ticket directly from your smartphone. Just a few clicks, a simple and secure payment, and they're ready to scan their ticket and go.
What made Open Tour so successful?
A smooth, optimized digital customer experience for increased sales performance. All on time and in keeping with the brand's DNA.
The technical solution
A WooCommerce WordPress platform
Discover the story of OPEN TOUR x Be Api
How can you increase the share of digital sales?
Growing in a highly competitive market, Open Tour Paris is accelerating its digital transformation, starting with the customer experience. To this end, the brand is redesigning its e-commerce site.
Growing in a highly competitive market, Open Tour Paris is accelerating its digital transformation, starting with the customer experience. To this end, the brand is redesigning its e-commerce site. Be API won the tender thanks to the strengths of the WordPress ecosystem for designing e-commerce sites, and strong convictions in terms of user experience. However, these convictions soon had to be called into question...
The business imperative: online sales to account for 20% of sales by 2020
"When we asked Open Tour Paris for their definition of digital happiness, they immediately replied: succeeding in making 1/5th of our sales online. No mean feat," recalls Amaury Balmer, founder and director of Be API.
The request from the Parisian leader in tourist buses was clear: increase sales on their website and optimize the customer experience.
Be API won the tender by simplifying the purchasing and information access paths, improving the "user journey" and making their customer and prospect base more animated, before, during and after the purchasing act. All of this by leveraging the strengths and vast possibilities of Woocommerce and WordPress.
What made the difference for us at Be Api was their mastery of the project's global challenges, their high-level technical expertise and their constant concern for the initial performance objective.
Marianne Albade.
HEAD OF DESIGn - BE API
The bus user survey that changed everything
As usual, the agency began by confronting its convictions with reality.
That which emerges from the analysis of existing data, but also that of the field. To do this, Antoine and Nawfel boarded a hop-on hop-off bus and interviewed travelers from all over the world. What did they discover? Open Tour customers buy their tickets on the spot, because for most of them, it's when they see the buses circulating in the streets of the capital that the idea of using them comes to them.
As users are above all mobile in the street, at the restaurant or in the hotel, the Open Tour interface must best meet their needs: simplicity, speed and clarity. All with the elegance of a brand emblematic of French art de vivre.
As is often the case, this changed our approach to the project. The priority now was to create a mobile-first site for impulse buying in Paris.
Antoine Paufichet
HEAD OF DESIGn - BE API
An ultra-simple digital - and especially mobile - shopping experience
The agency's UX teams therefore designed a purchasing module around a single product: the Open Tour Pass. The aim: to be as accurate, intuitive and easy to use as possible. A single product, modular thanks to various options. Graphically treated like a ticket, the new purchasing module determined the rest of the artistic direction. This was based on what tourists see and what makes them want to buy: images of buses in front of famous Parisian landmarks. The look and feel of the interface is also animated by objects from the world of transport and the brand's colors, which are those of the French flag.
The mobile shopping path
A WordPress e-commerce solution developed to demanding deadlines
The e-commerce solution the agency developed for Open Tour is a multilingual, multicurrency WordPress platform. Coupled with the WooCommerce REST API, the ReactJS purchase module is connected to the RATPdev ticketing solution used by OpenTour. It allows customers to pay by various means, including mobile ones such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and generates e-tickets directly. On board the bus, all they have to do is scan the barcode on the ticket from their smarpthone, and off they go!
What's more, the deadline for going online was particularly tight. The Be API team therefore developed a progressive and pragmatic approach to achieve the objective on time.
To meet the deadline and ensure the site's accuracy, we released it in stages with a traffic dispatch: first it was visible to 10% of Internet users, then 50%, then 100%.
Nicolas Juen
CTO - BE API
"This gradual release was key to meeting the project's main challenge: getting the site out on time during peak tourist season without impacting sales," explains Marianne Aldabe, e-commerce & digital manager at Open Tour. "A smooth transition that also enabled us to correct any shortcomings identified by users as we went along."
Suggest "emotional" itineraries to better understand the product.
A (more than) encouraging result!
The site has just been launched, so it's too early to have any relevant feedback on its effectiveness. However, after just one month online, we've observed mobile performance far superior to last year's for the same month: +6% session duration, +15% mobile traffic, +50% page load speed...
We continue to optimize the site by analyzing data and observing user behavior.
"We have established a roadmap of improvements to be made following user feedback," concludes Marianne. "This work of continuous progress will enable us to optimize the purchase tunnels and increase the average basket".
