PayPal recently launched a season-ticket sales campaign with Ocean Park, Hong Kong’s largest theme park, racking up $730,000 in eight days by connecting the park’s Facebook fans to a hosted mobile buying experience.
Working with Wally Wong, who leads PayPal’s Hong Kong small/medium business (SMB) team, and Sam Kwong from the Global Solutions Consumer Channels team, Ocean Park connected 500,000 Facebook fans to an instant mobile buying site on PayPal’s Connected Commerce platform.
The multi-channel Connected Commerce platform was designed to make it easy for retailers to give their customers a “buy online, pick up in store” experience. Built on a hosted version of Magento Enterprise, it incorporates mobile buying through the Web, the PayPal app or QR code; a local pickup console; and other features that have been used by more than 100 merchants in four regions.
“Through our multi-channel platform, any merchant can create a great mobile commerce experience and reach buyers anywhere,” Kwong explained. “Once we provide them the platform, the sky’s the limit to their creativity.”
For Ocean Park, selling across channels has paid off. Of the first 30,000 visitors, 65 percent were on a mobile device, and more than 7.5% of browsers converted to buyers. The Hong Kong team will now help the park extend the campaign to its 220,000 fans on the micro-blog Weibo in mainland China, the source of 50 percent of their annual visitors.
These integrated efforts have gained recognition for PayPal, which won “Mob-Ex” mobile excellence awards in March from Mobile Marketing magazine, taking gold for “Best mCommerce Solution” and silver for “Best Use of QR Codes.”
In April, at Magento’s Imagine conference, PayPal’s Chief Technology Officer James Barrese launched two new free Magento extensions built on the platform – one for “order ahead” and one for “in-aisle selling.” The team is currently working on the next version of “order ahead,” and delivering “click to collect” as an extension.