How hard could buying an event ticket online be?
Too hard, if you ask me.
Sean Smith, what’s up with that?

The past few Christmases, I’ve spent hours trying to work through the rabbit holes that are Australian ticketing websites only to throw it in and stand next to a temporary DOS-like computer workstation in the nook of a small newsagent to get tickets as gifts. Not happy, Jan.

Funnily enough, I came across Sean Smith last year at a conference. He had lots of great ideas that made so much sense – I just wanted to see them in action and soon.

At the time, Sean was the Head of Digital Marketing at Ticketek. He’s since moved to Hotelclub (Orbitz) as the Global CRM and Online Manager. But I still felt a duty – on behalf of every Australian – to take my frustration firmly in hand to Sean and to corner him about the state of affairs with online ticketing because either I was stupid or someone was making too much money out of things being broken.

(BTW it is my assertion that ticketing in Australia is broken, not Sean’s)

1. Why do so many ticketing websites in Australia suck?

Sean Smith: Ticketing websites have the unfortunate position of not being able to please everyone for a number of reasons that I’ll try to explain.

SCARCITY:
For “hot” events that are likely to sell out, there is the issue of scarcity. A national tour may have 250,000 tickets, and 2 million punters trying to get them. This means that there will be a group of people who will use their ticketing site well to get their tickets of choice and will be quietly happy. The other 1.75 million punters who missed out will be angry, vocal, and blame the ticketing company or website.

SEAT VISIBILITY:
This is the most complained about “feature” missing from most ticketing sites, and one that ticketing companies have been spending considerable time on trying to find the right solution. There are two issues here, technical and supply, which I’ll try to explain as simply as possible.

In the technical realm, a company like Ticketek or Ticketmaster may have 800 venues, each capable of hundreds of different venue formations, most of which are then customised on an event by event basis. Then take a hot show where thousands of tickets are selling every second, and the issue of “currently available” becomes contentious because huge slabs of tickets will be visibly going offsale (ie sold) before a punter has the chance to choose them. The necessity for real-time rendering against ticket inventory with the ability to hold areas of tickets for purchasers to choose in real time becomes apparent. That being said, a certain big ticketing company is well on their way to building a solution – keep an eye out for it in 2009.

From a supply point of view, there is the issue of visibility as a deterent to buying tickets. For sell-out events this is less of an issue, but for events that need to sell more tickets (and most events in Australia & New Zealand fall into this category) allowing people to choose seats will mean that less-desirable seats simply won’t sell. The issue of yield (and therefore profitability, and for many events viability) raises its ugly head and event promoters will actively seek venues/companies/sites that do not allow individual seats to be chosen this way.

CONFLICTING B2B/B2C NEEDS:
Ticketing sites have to meet the needs of both their consumers and their suppliers, which don’t always meet in the middle. Suppliers are crucial, because without them ticketing companies have no inventory to sell and it is impossible to force best practice for consumers if this isn’t in the interests of event promoters. For example, if a ticketing company was to build in [customer] Reviews to their event pages, and bad reviews damaged sales, then that event promoter may actually stop future supply of tickets.

2. Why are answers to ticketing businesses’ questions not always in the data?

Sean Smith: Ticketek’s internal positioning mantra is “Connecting People to their Passions” and what is important in this statement is that event tickets are an emotional commodity, a gateway if you like to an emotional experience and likely long-term memory. Ticketing companies are well run businesses with enormous amounts of historical data with which to explore and learn from, but that data won’t tell you the likely success of an event because it is very much determined by its emotional connection to the public at a particular moment in time. Measuring demand levels therefore becomes difficult, regardless of the best modellers and forecasting – I’ve seen an event sell out 40 shows nationally in two days, only to come back two years later and struggle to sell half that.

3. Who really gets intangible e-commerce (ticketing, services) around the world right now, and how?

Sean Smith: Creating an excellent bespoke one-to-one user experience across a large enough consumer-base would be my key judging criteria, and I’m not sure anyone is doing it really well just yet. I’m very impressed with the online travel industry for its combination of innovation and scale, although in terms of bespoke one-to-one service there’s a fair way to go. “Professional branding” services such as LinkedIn offer a good intangible service although I’m not convinced of its long-term sustainability with the likelihood of free competitive offerings entering the market soon, if not already. Some airline companies do a middle-to-good job of it, and I was recently surprised at the purchase pipeline for Virginblue and its method of building different services into its basket.

4. What bad checkout practices that you have seen have forced the most drop-off?

Sean Smith: Nothing shits me more than a checkout service that appears in real-time only to end with a “we’ll manually process this on the next business day and come back to you”. Hiding taxes and fees until the moment of transaction is another annoyance. Forcing purchasers to sign-up as a member is another (and one I’ve been guilty of my entire online career). Harvesting too much personal data via “required fields” will increase drop-out rates substantially. And lastly, a fulfillment timeline that is too long will kill off transactions more than any other practice.

5. What website content gets people to buy?

Sean Smith: Reviews are the stand-out. The average online transaction involves (in simplified form): search & explore, identify target products, validate the potential purchase decision via reviews, and finally purchase. I don’t even think all reviews need to be positive, as long as they appear honest and “un-sponsored”, and you’d be surprised how many people continue to read reviews post-purchase (which can either alleviate, or exacerbate, post-purchase dissonance!). Outside of that the key is to stimulate an emotional response to push possible-customers past the line of apathy, and that can take either a positive form (eg the Apple site having working online demo’s of apps on iPhones) or a negative form (eg showing disturbing images of home-invasions to sell security products).

/ End

Many thanks to Sean for taking the time out to give us some insight into the online ticketing business. You can find him on Twitter (twice): @NakedBearMedia and @HotelClub. He also writes a blog at www.nakedbearmedia.com.

How would you fix ticketing in Australia?
Got ideas? Let’s see them!

Photo courtesy of PD Photography.

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