E-shop with training

E-commerce does not only stand for products. Increasingly, a course or workshop is being added to the shopping cart. The Shoper platform talks about the trend of selling training services through an online store.

Although online sales are mainly associated with tangible products, an important part of the e-commerce market is services. In 2016, the second most popular online shopping category in the European Union, after clothing and sports accessories, was tours and accommodation. According to Eurostat[1], 52 percent of Europeans buying online ordered this type of service. 38 percent of e-customers ordered tickets electronically, and 6 percent of e-buyers ordered e-learning materials. And it is the market for training services that is currently booming online.

- Among the offerings of stores using our software, we see a growing share of training and workshops. The trend of investing in one's own development - be it professional or in one's interests - translates into a greater supply of such services, distributed online, notes Tomasz Tybon, director of marketing and sales at Dreamcommerce, a provider of Shoper online store software.

E-shop dedicated only to training is a relatively recent phenomenon. Until a few years ago, their online sales were limited to a company's online business card. To use training services, a customer had to send an email and wait for a response, or alternatively call and arrange mutually suitable dates. Introducing training as a product into an e-store allows one to go through the entire purchasing process with a few clicks, including selecting an appointment and making payment. The e-commerce model requires a good specification and description of the different variants of workshops, along with matching the target group, e.g. a company conducting cooking workshops can create an offer for children, for adults, events for companies and still the possibility to order a gift certificate. The offer of services can be wide, the system does not limit the seller in any way. This form of presentation allows to scale the business much faster, to add new variants of trainings or workshops depending on the reaction of the market, and the mechanism of the store, thanks to the automation of sales, allows to handle more orders more efficiently.

Selling through an online store is praised by Agnieszka Kruk, founder of Storylab.pro, which sells workshops and courses for screenwriters and filmmakers through the store. - I've been in business for 7 years and switching from a website to an e-store has automated and accelerated the sales process. For us, two tools have been particularly useful. First, hooking up an online accounting program to the store, so that invoices generate themselves after a purchase is made. Second, the provision of installment payment options. Online crediting is done automatically and without the need to involve the salesperson, which avoids the uncomfortable situation when a customer asks us to split the payment into parts because of a difficult situation," he says.

Increasingly, workshops are also being offered by e-stores that sell products. Vendors introduce an additional element as an addition to their offerings, e.g. a film equipment store recommends drone handling training to customers, a fabric store recommends a sewing academy on the machine, a Spanish oil store offers a workshop on the product, a cosmetics store offers a course on how to make your own creams. Workshops also appear on the pages of stores that provide services to businesses, not just individual customers.

- Selling training courses as products in online stores is an interesting yet smart move. Expanding your offerings with new items is key to attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, and in the case of workshops, the store additionally gains traction and stands out from the competition. It allows customers to develop and deepen their interests, shows practical use of products, and by offering participation in workshops in the form of a gift certificate, it fits into the broader trend of gifting experiences rather than things," stresses Tomasz Tybon of the Shoper platform.