In August, Flow and the Two Oceans Aquarium launched the selling of online tickets through the aquarium’s new website we developed together earlier this year. Flow and the Two Oceans Aquarium had been working very closely together on this exciting project for a few months and early in August the time finally came for the head of Flow’s programming team, Richard Frank, to travel to Cape Town and assist with training all the relevant people.
Flow has designed a seamless interface for the aquarium’s e-commerce needs, and selling online tickets is just the first phase of an exciting line-up of products including membership and diving with the aquarium’s sharks that we will be selling through the website.
Although we launched quietly, to enable us to test our system thoroughly once it went live, in the first week we sold 46 individual tickets to purchasers from as far afield as Mozambique, Johannesburg, and Ohio in the USA. We also sold many to local Capetonians. Once you’ve bought your tickets online – at a fabulous 10% discount – you print them out and simply go straight to the entrance turnstile (each transaction bears a unique barcode), bypassing any ticket queues, which can be quite long on busy days.
Now it’s all systems go to create the most effective promotional strategy for these products: from harnessing the power of our growing social-networking base to exploring international travel websites and local tour operators’ needs.
We’re also now hard at work at developing phase two of the aquarium’s e-commerce offerings. Soon we will be selling aquarium memberships and highly popular diving excursions through our new platform; we will also offer specific products exclusively through the website so watch this space for the exciting news!