HKairportShop – Airport Online Shopping & Pickup Service Platform Built With Webkul
HKairportShop is a virtual storefront by Airport Authority Hong Kong that gives passengers an experience to shop online and self-pickup at the airport.
This unique airport online shopping platform offers a worldwide selection of products, including beauty and skincare, fragrances, wine, fashion and apparel, and like.
Once you place an online order through its official e-commerce platform HKairportShop.com, you will be ready to collect your items in 90 minutes at the earliest.
HKairportShop is providing travellers with a hassle-free shopping experience and allows them to pick up their ordered items before departure or after arrival at the HKIA (Hong Kong Internation Airport).
HKairportShop ensures 100% authentic goods that enable travellers to shop with absolute confidence; and with their customer support and special gift wrapping set, every shopping experience at HKairportShop is a pleasure.
Impact of Covid on the Travel Industry
The Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the travel industry the most. Due to the ban on international as well as domestic travel many flights are not operational, and so are the physical retail shops at the airports.
Moreover, the sale of the luxury goods shops is down badly, as business travellers and other high spenders are staying at home.
But as the world begins to open up for travel and business, airport retailers are dipping their toes in the water to make up for the lost revenue.
- Changing the format of how travellers shop or eat
- Brands are now aiming at the younger shoppers
- Compete with the traditional duty-free shops
Some examples include: on-demand online food delivery app companies like Deliveroo and Uber Eats have started pilot programs at Amsterdam, Toronto, and Dubai airports.
With this new delivery service, passengers can simply order from the mobile app, website, or via. the airport wifi service and wait for the food item to be delivered directly at your boarding gate.
Further, the Click-and-Collect service is now being introduced at many airports to make travellers’ shopping journeys more convenient.
Airport Online Shopping Platform
With the flight ban lifting up, Hong Kong International Airport was also ready with its reworked click-and-collect platform i.e. HKairportShop.
The HKairportShop platform is built on Adobe Commerce Cloud, formerly known as Magento 2 Enterprise Cloud Edition, offering cloud-based services on AWS, Fastly and Azure.
It is a popular choice for large-scale businesses and enterprises that want to set up and drive their digital commerce experience.
Adobe Commerce platform has an edge above its competitors due to:
- Flexible code structure that can adapt to your business need
- Ability to scale with hundreds or thousands of SKUs
- Offer multi-channel commerce experience within a single platform
- Endless support services and robust security updates
- A huge network of development community and technology partners
Once the Adobe Commerce based e-commerce platform was set up, the client was looking for a solution that enable various airport store owners to use the same platform to list and sell their products.
Much like simply, converting physical retail stores at the mall or market into a digital commerce marketplace like Amazon or Walmart.
Powered by Webkul Marketplace
As HKairportShop aimed to sell products from different airport retail stores on its shopping platform. Webkul marketplace solution for Adobe Commerce is being deployed.
With HKairportShop now converted to a multi-vendor/multi-store marketplace, they are now able to onboard many retailers and airport shop owners to add their products across categories from international brands.
Although every airport shop owner may be running their own version of digital stores on separate e-commerce websites. Like Beauty & You, DFS Beauty, TripAdvisor, Monocle and others.
But, with HKairportShop, these retail store owners have the advantage to do multichannel selling via the online Magento 2 Multi Vendor marketplace. Plus, it will also be more convenient for the buyers to find all the products in one place.
Every retail shop owner can add their product listings, manage orders, and process payments within the HKairportShop platform.
From selling jewellery, fragrances, wine and liquor, all other different types of items can now be bought online and later be picked up before or after the flight.
On every product listing, we can also see the shop name to know where the travellers are buying their products from.
Besides that, in the shopping cart section, all the products are split and shown based on the seller’s stores. Next, the shoppers need to mention their pickup and delivery options and proceed to the checkout process.
After their flight details and pick up or delivery information is provided, the customers can then pay for the order using multiple payment options available- Amex, Visa, AliPay, WePay and MasterCard.
Monitoring Retailer Product Listings
Webkul Marketplace platform supports bulk-upload product listing functionality for all the retailers onboard.
Allowing airport store owners to upload CSV format spreadsheet files containing all the catalogue data about the product listing.
Moreover, it also provides an ability for the Magento administrator to check and bulk-upload vendor products from the backend system.
Besides that, the client wanted to have a custom developed component for the admin portal, where log records of all the bulk-marketplace products and vendors can be maintained and easily viewable later on.
For instance, if any retail store owner mass uploads the products then the following information in the log were mentioned – upload date and time, user activity, file name, download option, error log maintenance, execution time, and summary (created, updated, or deleted).
Being a marketplace administrator, it is a prime responsibility to have well-maintained product listings with all the necessary information, manage site operations, and assort merchandise.
Plus, efficiently manage the complete digital commerce channel to drive maximum traffic and generate revenue.
Low Inventory Threshold Notification
There are many routes to how an e-commerce product is delivered to consumers after an order is placed.
While online retailers generally don’t need to hold merchandise at their location. As their product items are either stored at a nearby warehouse location or are directly delivered by the third-party suppliers.
However, if products are not reached at their promised delivery times or not fulfilled at all, it greatly deters the consumer’s confidence in the merchant and the shopping platform where they placed the order.
As an online retailer, it doesn’t make sense to list products that are not readily available. Likewise, if you are selling a third-party item online and there is no guarantee on the supplier’s shipment lead time, this will affect your business.
Being a multi-vendor marketplace, HKairportShop hosts many retailer shops that sell hundreds or thousands of SKUs. The client wanted to keep an assessment on how the low inventory items were handled by the airport shop retailers.
Whether any notifications were configured for vendors or any threshold limit was there for each item. Magento and Webkul Marketplace do provide low inventory notification email notification, despite this we further enhanced the inventory management system.
Enabling marketplace retailers to receive out-of-stock notifications for their items once all the units were sold out.
Further, we provided functionality to the administrator to set a threshold limit on low stock and out of stock per SKU and per retailer.
Product Return Management System
Returning and exchanging products is an indispensable part of retail shopping. Whether buying online or offline, consumers expect to see clear and transparent return and refund policies prior to purchasing any item.
In Magento Open Source, the RMA system is not available, however, in the Adobe Commerce platform, it is provided for the admin and the customers. Where a return request can be raised and managed with reasons, status, item condition, and other attributes.
For HKairportShop, the client is using our custom-developed Returned Merchandise Authorization (RMA) system.
Where Webkul development team made several changes to restrict marketplace retailer workflow, providing more accessibility to administrators, and re-designed RMA email notifications.
- RMA reason reject management
- Modify RMA status email templates
- Vendor RMA management by admin
- Redesign vendor marketplace panel
In the current workflow, only the HKairportShop admin users can approve and manage refund requests. Giving them the complete right to manage the Marketplace RMA System. Vendors can only view the RMA requests for their orders and products.
Being a marketplace owner, delivering a consistent customer experience to all shoppers is of utmost priority. Return policies may vary from seller to seller, but still, online marketplace owners have to protect the buyer’s interest against all disputes.
Airport Retailing – Bouncing Back
There is no doubt that in the past two years travel and hospitality industry has suffered the most burn due to the pandemic.
However, with the decrease in Covid cases and the resumption of business and leisure activities, the airport retailing businesses are too reviving.
Besides tax and duty-free stores where passengers save local and national taxes, airport retailing includes many different varieties of products and services.
Such as food outlets, hotels, car rental, exchange offices, SIM providers, books stores, gifts and souvenirs shops.
Now, with rising in the number of vaccinated passengers travelling abroad and domestically is prompting optimism for a strong bounce-back in the airport retailing industry.
Furthermore, the airport shops, conveniences stores, retailers and airport management authorities are looking forward to welcoming the travellers once again and making positive changes to the retail shopping experience to win back the lost sales.