The voucher codes we use to give away free review copies of your tour are also an easy way to sell hundreds or even thousands of copies of it at once. They work well when a single organisation wants to offer your tour to groups and in the past we’ve used voucher codes to make tours available to hotel guests, school groups, festival goers, and people attending conferences. But voucher codes also work as a way for everybody from Expedia to the coffee shop on the corner to resell your tour and make a small profit in the process. This cut actually works out better for you financially a lot of the time because resellers normally expect less than Apple and Google’s 30% for processing in-app purchases.
There are two ways to approach bulk sales, depending on who takes payment and then both distributes and manages the vouchers: you or us.
When you are the seller #
If you’d like to manage the whole process yourself, from landing the deal to taking payment and managing distribution, then you can buy vouchers codes for a special “storyteller price” of $0.89 per copy if you’re on the Basic Plan. If you’re on the Pro or Premium plans, 1,000 or 5,000 voucher codes per year are included, respectively, and you if you need more, you can buy at these at the discounted plan rates. (This only applies if you are not making the tour available for free.)
You can charge your partners whatever you like for your voucher codes, and keep the profits to yourself. When you need more codes, simply email [email protected] and we’ll send you your codes and an invoice payable by credit card or PayPal.
Some publishers buy codes directly from VoiceMap, print their own tickets, and sell them in shops. This works in local tourism shops, museums, and galleries, especially where the businesses are readily setup to take a 10-25% commission from selling a local artist’s work.
When VoiceMap is the seller #
If an organisation buys voucher codes directly from VoiceMap, it’s often at a price with a bulk discount. This could be a deal that you initiate and bring to us, or it could work the other way around, with the client contacting us first. If that does happen, we’ll make sure you agree to the discounted price. After that, we’ll invoice the client and collect the money. You’ll get paid in royalties, as usual, at the standard 50% rate.
Here’s an example: a hotel buys 1,000 copies of your tour for $2 each. You get $1 and we get $1. If the hotel is reselling those copies instead of giving them away, they are free to do that for any price up to and including the price of the tour online. If the online price was is $4.99, the hotel can sell the tour for $3.99 thus making 100% profit on their $2.00 initial cost while being able to sell the tour at a better price than VoiceMap’s online price.
Deals like this can continue indefinitely, with VoiceMap issuing new voucher codes and taking payments periodically without any extra effort on your part, and payment can be made online, using a credit card or PayPal.
How it works #
Tour voucher codes are always made up of eight alphanumeric lowercase characters. Each code can be valid for as many copies as you like. Codes that are valid for multiple copies are easier to distribute, but are also open to abuse. Somebody could buy a code once, for instance, and then share it online until every copy is used up. While we’ll always try to be reasonable if this sort of thing does happen, we can’t promise to replace these copies or issue refunds, and if you are worried about abuse, it’s safer to go with one copy of your tour per voucher code.
The owner of the vouchers can keep track of redemptions and inventory at voicemap.me using their dashboard. To find out more, or to buy “storyteller copies” of your tour for resale, send an email to [email protected].