A couple weeks ago, Inntopia launched YieldView, a new estore platform that is fully integrated with their other products as well as RTP, Siriusware, and SKIDATA. With lower fees (5% for a typical setup and closer to 2% if it is bundled with other Inntopia products) my first inclination was that this was a direct competitor to Liftopia’s Cloud Store.

Now, they are very similar from an end-result standpoint (sell date-specific products from your website) but a very different approach has been taken to the same problem. Let me explain with five areas where these two products differ in their approach.

DESIGN
YieldView gives resorts full control over the design of their store. You have full access to the CSS files and can even build a custom solution using the YieldView’s XML feeds.

Cloud Store’s design is nearly identical from store-to-store. The main difference being the custom header image and color scheme so it matches the resort’s website.

OPTIMIZATION*
YieldView gives the resort the opportunity to optimize their store. While the basic flow is there, increasing coversions through design, layout, copy, etc. are mostly up to the resort.

Cloud Store’s system is hands-off in this sense. Optimized already using data from Liftopia’s standard store as well data gathered from Cloud Store’s, you don’t have to optimize but can’t tweak something within the store if you want to split test.

ANALYTICS
YieldView fully integrates with Google Analytics giving the marketer control over what reports to generate, goals to setup, and conversion tracking.

Cloud Store’s analytics are custom, built-in and are the same analytics you use within your Liftopia account to track sales, trends, etc.

MOBILE
YieldView’s flexible platform allows the resort to build a mobile-friendly storefront into their mobile site.

Cloud Store has a pre-built mobile site that is part of every install.

DATA
YieldView is fully integrated with RTP, Siriusware, and SKIDATA as well as other Inntopia products which provides opportunities for upsells on things like lodging.

Cloud Store provides some data, but is not directly integrated.

The Gist
Aside from integration, I’d summarize the difference as such. YieldView is a platform to build your own solution. Liftopia is more of a turn-key solution that works well right out of the box.

You can either rely on Liftopia’s already created design, optimized flow, analytics, and mobile-friendly side or use a powerful platform like YieldView to recreate that on your own in the exact form you’d like.

Both options are great choices, it simply comes down to your choice of approach: a platform to build just about anything on or a solution you can, for the most part, set and forget.

*Conversion
Let me say a quick word more about optimization and conversion. Fees are an important thing to consider, but use this example of 1,000 daily visitors and a $50 ticket price to show how conversion might be a bigger issue:

SCENARIO A
Let’s say a 5% conversion rate and a 10% transaction fee.
1000 visitors x 5% conv x $50 pass = $2500 x 10% fee = $2250 ($15,750 wk)

SCENARIO B
Let’s guess a 4% conversion rate and a 0% transaction fee.
1000 visitors x 4% conv x $50 pass = $2000 x 0% fee = $2000 ($14,000 wk)

If you think a 20% difference in conversion rate is exaggerating, I think you greatly underestimate the power of an optimzed website. Key tweaks in copy and flow can half or double the conversion of any given page. Conversion rate is an important factor to remember and do the math on when comparing options.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.