February 20, 2025
Camp registration should be intuitive and simple for families—without sacrificing flexibility or functionality.
Crafting a
customer-friendly camp registration experience
is about finding the right tools to balance convenience for camp families with efficiency for your camp operations.
iCampPro streamlines the camp registration process with a shopping-cart-style checkout system that feels familiar to today’s online shoppers. With iCampPro, families can:
Families can even create their accounts in advance, adding basic profile information for adults and children in their household that may attend or interact with your camp ahead of your registration dates. But even if a camp family forgets to add a camper ahead of time, creating one as they browse events and begin the registration workflow is both seamless and hassle-free.
At this point, you might be wondering: This sounds great for families, but how does it address my camp’s needs?
How does iCampPro handle critical registration details, like:
Don't worry! iCampPro has those needs covered.
In iCampPro, optional purchases allow you to offer and organize certain add-ons directly within the camp registration and checkout process without lengthy forms. Think of it as an intuitive way to upsell or gather important information—without forcing families through lengthy forms upfront.
NOTE:
If you want to learn more about how our form process works for collecting details and agreements, try reading this next:
Camp Forms Help—Tackling the Most Essential Item in Your Camp’s Toolkit.
In the past, our optional purchase checkout tools focused on simple purchase questions—like if the family wanted to purchase a souvenir or another item for their camper at a specified price. They’d check a box and presto! The fee was added to the checkout.
The system was simple and effective, but we knew it could do more! We consulted with several camp leaders to explore possibilities and plan enhancements.
Now for the great news! We’ve officially released 5 core enhancements to optional purchases to add more flexibility, while maintaining a user-friendly experience. Keep reading to find out more about the new, expanded checkout capabilities!
1. Some Things Are Better Said with a Picture
A picture is worth a thousand words. We may not know who said it, but we know it’s true—especially when it comes to engaging camp families. Now, you can include an image alongside optional purchases to make offerings clearer and more appealing.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway! Boost engagement by adding an image to optional purchases.
2. Free Giveaways & No-Cost Options
Not every add-on has a price. Some camps use optional purchases to offer free selections—like requesting a new camper tour. These selections help staff prepare for camp and provide a more positive and engaging camper experience.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway! Include no-cost optional purchases to streamline planning and host happier campers from day one.
3. Offer Items with Variations
Keep things organized by grouping multiple variations under a single drop-down option. For example, instead of listing multiple t-shirt sizes separately, offer a single “Camp T-Shirt” field with pricing and size variations built into the available options.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway! Use item variations to simplify choices for camp families while upselling registrations with popular camp merchandise.
4. Present Decisions with Required Answers
Now, you can set up required optional purchases, ensuring certain selections—such as after-care enrollment or special accommodations—are made before checkout. At least one variation option must have an unlimited quantity available.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway! Add a set of options and require an answer for any must-know details that could significantly impact a camper’s experience.
5. Manage Limited-Quantity Items
If you have limited-quantity promotional items (like a giveaway for the first 100 registrants), you can now track availability at either the season level or per individual event—offering more control over your promotions and reserved registration-based inventories.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway! Exercise control over limited-quantity promotional offers tied to camp registration.
The animation below offers a peek at the setup end of a few example optional purchases.
Previously, optional purchases appeared in the checkout process after selecting one or more events to register a camper for. They appeared at the bottom of a window listing details of the event registration(s) that were being added to the checkout.
But now that we’ve added all of the capabilities above, the way that optional purchases are presented has gotten a complete makeover! How can it be so flexible and still presented in a way that’s simple and user-friendly? Let us show you!
If an optional purchase is required, it now appears on the initial registration page, where the camp family chooses the attendee and event date(s) they will be registering for.
This placement ensures families make informed decisions up front—especially for required options with limited availability, such as special accommodations or meal plans. Only variation choices with a remaining quantity that matches or exceeds the total number of selected events can be selected to proceed. The cost of the attendee’s choice is multiplied by the number of events selected.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway!
Use required optional purchases for high-priority decisions about camp registration.
After making required decisions and choosing “register now” the camp family or attendee is presented with their selected event date(s), along with any other optional purchase add-ons they can add.
This area is great for listing truly optional items or packages that may only be available for certain events, optional freebies, promoting camp merch, or even an optional field trip or activity for a specific excursion.
For optional purchases linked to camps with multi-event date selection, the optional purchase item will automatically multiply the cost by the number of the selected events which offer that item during checkout.
🎬 Actionable Takeaway!
Think about what promotional items you want to offer alongside each registration, plus optional experiences like field trips that aren’t required.
The animation below offers a quick peek at the updated registration and checkout process for a camp with optional purchases!
Once selections are made, families can finalize their checkout—or add more registrations for additional campers or events.
If a camp family changes their mind and wants to add an unrequired optional purchase item after they complete initial registration, iCampPro makes it easy for them to find available optional purchases tied to each camp registration and pay for them online as a separate transaction.
Because iCampPro separates the lengthy forms from the initial checkout process, families can complete registration in a few minutes, not hours.
It’s simple and quick, which is why camp families love registering with iCampPro!
Now that your camp has flexible tools to collect key information during registration, the next step is putting that data to work. iCampPro allows you to track and analyze optional purchases at different levels:
Easily run reports on one or all optional purchase items to streamline logistics, spot trends, manage inventory, and add valuable feedback into your camp team’s planning process well before camp.
iCampPro provides powerful tools and features to empower camps with a customizable, streamlined, and efficient registration system.
🚀 Existing customers: Need help setting up these features? Visit our Knowledgebase via the help icon in your Admin Portal or reach out to our support team!
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Not familiar with iCampPro? Ready to simplify your camp’s registration process? Schedule a demo below to see iCampPro in action!
