Product Experiences

Product Experiences represent the experiences that you sell. This includes describing the experience, pricing, schedules, cancelation policies, terms and conditions, and dozens of other preferences. Your experience is very customizable, but take your time; we will start with the basics.

Select Products > Experiences from the Xola menu bar and dive right in.

Product Experiences - Dropdown.png

Global Settings

Notice the Global Settings button under the Products List on the left-hand side. This is where you set up things that are shared amongst all of your experiences.

Global Settings include:

Note: Settings marked with an asterisk (*) can be set at the Global or experience level.

Please take a few minutes to click through and see what can be set in each category and to familiarize yourself with the defaults when something is not explicitly set when configuring an experience. For now, we will take the default settings that were configured when your Xola account was set up.

Product

Time to create a Product, click on the blue Create a Product button and create a new product.

Xola allows you to store all of the information associated with your product in one place. Although creating your first product can be a bit daunting, you will quickly master the process.

Notice that Xola indicates the fields required to set up a product with a red dot. We will create our first product by filling in only what is required. Later, you can return it and flesh out the product with more details.

Under Descriptive Content:

Title: The title is the name for the experience that your customers see when they go through the purchase workflow.
Excerpt: Create a brief excerpt, a short sentence or two, that represents the experience for the customer during the reservation process.
Description: The description section describes the experience that people purchase through some third-party platforms such as Viator.
Meeting Location: Designate where your customers should show up to begin their experience. Use the map to pin an exact location and the text field to provide an address and instructions to get people where they need to be.
Click the blue Save button to create the experience in Xola

Under Schedules & Availability:

Duration: Set the Customer Facing duration to the time a customer should expect the experience to last. Then, set the Equipment duration to the time that anything associated with the experience is not available for another experience (For example, any buffer time between events for setup, transitions, etc).
Schedule: Create a schedule that offers start times and dates for your customers to select from. Multiple schedules can be added to a single experience. (Configure the basics; we will circle back to look at all your schedule options later)
Guest Limits:
- Per Reservation Limit: Set the minimum and maximum group sizes that are best for your experience to be applied per reservation.
- Per Event Limit: Set the minimum and maximum group sizes that are best for your experience to be applied per event (inclusive of all reservations for that particular event).
Availability Restrictions:
- Early Cutoff: Configure a time window to prevent purchases made too close to a start time. (For example cutting off the ability for customers to make reservations one hour prior to the event start time). Please note that this will only affect front-end checkout reservations and will not apply to reservations made in the back office.
- Future Cutoff: Configure a time window to prevent purchases that are made too far in advance (For example, cutting off the ability for customers to make reservations more than 90 days out)

Under Pricing:

Experience Types:
- Public Experience (shared): Select this option to allow multiple groups to make reservations within an available time slot.
- Private Experience: Select this option to only allow one reservation per time slot
- Public & Private Experience: Select this option to allow a group to choose whether they would like to book a shared experience or a private experience at the time of purchase.
Demographic: Demographics describe the types of people you expect to sell the experience to. Customers will select from this list when making a reservation. Demographics include groups like adults, children, seniors, etc.
Public/Private Price:
- Pricing Structure
  - Flat Pricing: Set a flat price per person or per event
  - Tiered Pricing: Add tiers to set pricing terms for each demographic dependent on the number of guests in a reservation.
Down Deposit: You can choose to enable deposit payments at any time interval leading up to the event start time.
- Deposit Amount: You can set the deposit amount to be paid at the time of purchase.
- Checkout Preference: Choose between allowing customers to pay the full amount or deposit, or requiring them to pay deposit only at the time of purchase.
- Balance due date: Set when the remaining balance is due for a reservation and elect to automatically send an invoice on the due date if the balance isn't paid. Please note: having this enabled does not automatically collect any remaining balance due.

You can return later to learn more about creating an experience in the Product Configuration > Product Description section of the help center.

Note: If you need to duplicate an existing experience, you can easily do this by clicking on the three dots and clicking Duplicate. This can only be performed by Xola Admins. Product Experiences - Duplicate.png

Packages

Packages allow you to bundle multiple Xola experiences into one product offering. They're a great way to group and showcase more than one experience offering while driving incremental revenue by encouraging larger purchases.

We're not going to discuss packages now, but we wanted you to know that they are there. Come back to the help center later for assistance setting up and using packages in your offerings, with articles in the Product Configuration > Packages section.