This article reflects my personal experiences and opinions about ticketing platforms. It’s not meant to disparage any company but to discuss why I’m embarking on creating my own ticketing solution.
Introduction
For legal reasons I’m going to refer to the ticket platform I use as “redacted” throughout this post. I’m not trying to get sued, I’m just trying to share my experience with some platforms and why I’m building my own ticketing platform.
My Journey as a seller on this platform
Credit where credit is due
To start, it’s important to acknowledge that “redacted” has many strengths. It offers a straightforward setup for events and ticket sales, with an intuitive user interface that many find user-friendly. Setting ticket prices, managing capacities, and generating discount codes are all quite manageable.
For a customer, the search features are adequate (not great) and the checkout process is simple and quick.
First Impressions
Initially, my experience as a seller on “redacted” was positive. I was able to quickly set up events, track sales, and manage commissions. So far, so good.
It was easy to setup Google Analytics and Snapchat Pixel tracking and establish multiple links to monitor the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns.
The customer experience
Honestly, the customer experience is not bad. I’ve used the platform to buy tickets for events and it’s been a pretty good experience.
The checkout process is simple and quick, and the platform makes it really easy to find tickets after you’ve purchased them. Fantastic app for scanning tickets at the door as well.
But that’s where the good stuff ends.
It’s all downhill from here
Handling unique links
Firstly, this is very much a ME problem, but I wanted to share it anyway as its a good segue into the rest of the article.
So, I wanted to make it so that reps could have a unique link on my domain to sell tickets through. This is where the problems started.
Many platforms provide a code for each rep at each event, for example: example.com/abc123
In order to have a unique link on my domain, I wanted to create a subdomain for each rep, for example: rep1.mydomain.com, rep2.mydomain.com, etc. My chosen platform does not natively support this, so I was going to create an S3 bucket with a static site that redirected to the rep’s link and use CloudFront to serve it over the subdomain.
This is where the fun begins.
The page will throw a 404 if you place a trailing slash at the end of the rep’s link.
What?
How do you even manage to do that? Like, what kind of backend system are you running that can’t handle a trailing slash?
So, example.com/abc123 works, but example.com/abc123/ does not. Using S3 and CloudFront a trailing slash is automatically added to the end of the URL, so my customers were getting a 404 when they clicked on the custom link.
Great. Just great.
A nondescript 404 page I created so I dont get sued.
I eventually managed to create a workaround to this using AWS Lambda@Edge functions on the CloudFront viewer request, but why do I have to go through all that just to create a redirect that would work for almost any OTHER website?
Fees, fees, fees
I understand that platforms need to make money, but the fees on some platforms are just ridiculous. I’m not going to name any names, but some platforms charge a huge fee for each ticket sold.
My customers will be paying a minimum of 10% on top of the listed ticket price as a booking fee. Do I think that’s fair? No. Absolutely there has to be a fee somewhere, but I don’t feel like I am getting value for the fee that my customers are paying.
Why should my customers have to pay a fee for a service that I feel is subpar?
Analytics, or lack thereof
Yep, there is practically 0 analytics for you as a seller on some platforms. I mean sure, you can see which event you sold tickets for and on which day but… Graphs? Forecasting? Literally anything else?
Nope, dream on buddy.
Surely as some of the most prolific ticket distributors in the UK you would offer some sort of analytics to the sellers on your platform, as is standard on literally any other platform in the world?
At least I can export my customer information as a CSV file and use that to make my own graphs and forecasts.
You’ve got to be kidding me
Not sure if this is a feature or a bug
Here are some of the fields that one platform allows me to export as a CSV file for each event:
- Customer name
- Customer email
- Information related to the ticket they purchased
and most importantly:
- The email address to send the customer information to
I’m sorry, what? I can enter any email address to send the customer information to? It’s not the email linked to my business account, it’s a field that I can enter any email address into.
Yep, thats right. I can enter any email address and send the customer information to that email address. No verification, no confirmation, nothing. Just type in an email address and hit send.
I’m no security expert, but this seems like a pretty big oversight to me.
What kind of security nightmare is this? If someone gets into my account, they can export all of my customer information to their email address and there is nothing I can do about it.
Maybe I can set up 2FA or atleast link to OAuth for logins?
Nope.
Security? What’s that?
This is common knowledge, right?
I’m gonna list a few basic security features that I expect from a platform that handles all my revenue and potentially sensitive customer information and see how a platform that is used by some of the biggest event organisers in the UK stacks up:
- Email and password login - Check
- 2FA - Nope
- OAuth provider support - Still no
- Suspicious activity alerts - You wish
- Unrecognised device alerts - Not a chance
- Password complexity requirements - Nah
- Some kind of IAM style system for account access - Who do you think we are?
The above list is correct as of the time of writing.
I mean, come on. This is 2024. 2024. And you’re telling me that a platform that is used by some of the biggest event organisers in the UK doesn’t have any of these basic security features?
People are trusting these platforms with their revenue and customer information and they haven’t even implemented basic security features that are standard on any large platform in 2024.
Nil, nada, zilch.
My solution?
I’m building my own ticketing platform
Yep, you heard me right. I’m building my own ticketing platform because I cannot operate like this any longer. Maybe some people are okay with this, but I’m not.
I’m building a modern, secure, and feature-rich ticketing platform that will be available to everyone. I’m building a platform that will have all the features any seller would expect from a modern ticketing platform.
I’m building a platform that will have:
- Lower fees for customers and sellers
- Proper analytics and forecasting
- A modern and secure backend
- A developer-friendly API
- And anything else that you would expect from a modern ticketing platform
In a show of good faith and my commitment to the project, I’m going to be documenting the entire development process on this blog. I’m going to be sharing everything from the initial design, the frameworks and libraries that I’m using, the frontend design, the backend architecture and everything in between.
If you’re a promoter and you’re interested in joining the project, drop me an email at [admin@justluke.dev] and I’ll be more than happy to work with you on the development of the platform and offer you lower fees for your events.
We should not have to put up with this in 2024. Sort your s#!t out.
