SK Chase
Edinburgh based company SK Chase enables hospitality and leisure businesses to sell gift vouchers through their own websites.
The Problem
A bright idea, some creative partnerships and lots of hard work are creating new opportunities for tourism businesses to increase sales.
The initiative, spearheaded by Edinburgh based company SK Chase, enables hospitality and leisure businesses to sell gift vouchers - for gifts that can range from champagne dinners to weekend breaks, spa treatments to luxury items - through their own websites.
Director Stephanie Wilson said: "When my business partner and I first came up with the idea we knew that for the venture to work we would need to secure a software partner that would enable us to develop the technology underpinning the initiative.
Ezone develops online gift voucher service
SK Chase spent much time researching and investigating ways to set up a gift voucher service and discovered there are a lot of barriers, such as having to have a shopping cart, online merchant status, a secure payment gateway, as well as an efficient 'back-end' to track all the gift voucher orders and so on.
They managed to overcome and simplify many of these, with considerable help from Ezone Interactive.
Stephanie said: "We'd both worked with Ezone Interactive on other projects and were impressed with the way they operated as a business and with their web site content management system, the WMS. We thought they would make the ideal partner and in fact, they have become an integral part of our business plan, having created an online gift voucher application, based on their WMS, which enables our clients to effectively manage their own gift voucher program including selling gift vouchers to their clients via their web site."
"Ezone has not only created a very sophisticated gift voucher system, the team there have also added so much value by suggesting better ways of achieving our desired goals. When we've met a seemingly insurmountable problem, we've sat down with Ezone and worked out how to overcome it."
Tourism Innovation Development Award
The system helped SK Chase win an award for their innovative approach to business. "When we discovered that no-one else is offering this type of service in the UK and we were getting such a positive response from potential clients, we decided to apply for the Scottish Enterprise Tourism Innovation Development Award (TIDA)," said Stephanie.
Winning the award has brought welcome matched funding and professional business advice. This has also meant that SK Chase has been able to appoint Ezone to complete additional development work on the application to further improve its functionality.