Six tips for the perfect ticket on-sale
Isn't it great to see live events coming back? We're very happy to hear from our customers that people are starting to book again. We've also been thrilled to see evidence of pent-up demand, with some very busy on-sales as audiences start to return.
So we thought this would be a good time for a recap. Here are six tips on using CrowdHandler for the perfect ticket on-sale.
1: Pre-schedule and test
We know that season on-sales – with or without priority booking, offers and discounting – can be complex. So our first piece of advice is to give yourself time to test everything carefully. You can do this by pre-scheduling your on-sale: setting your waiting room to engage an hour before your on-sale and setting your ticketing system to go live shortly afterward, with the queue activating at the official on-sale time.
The waiting room will gather up any users who might be sitting on your site waiting for tickets and put them into a pre-queue with an excitement-building countdown. Meanwhile, you can put everything on sale, and use our IP bypass feature to access the site before your users arrive.
Use this hour of calm before the storm to give the site a thorough test: making sure that your priority codes work, and that everyone will be able to access the right types of tickets.
2: Use URL pattern-matching
The ability to restrict certain URLs rather than the whole site can be very useful. If you're running a single ticket on-sale, for example, you might want to restrict access to the seat selection page for a specific performance, or range of performances, whilst leaving access to other transactional elements (season ticket sales, memberships, donations, etc) completely open.
You can do this by using URL pattern-matching (editing the “protect URLs” field) to ensure that only specific ticketing paths are restricted.
3: Add a priority lane for VIPs
If you are running a pre-sale, consider using our priority codes feature to provide simple preferential access to members or subscribers. Like priority boarding on a plane, CrowdHandler's priority access system allows you to open up a new lane for everyone with a code. If your system doesn't have a lot of capability for managing priority bookings, this is a simple way of adding this useful feature to your on-sale.
4: Communicate with your users
Use the message feature to keep people in the waiting room up to date as the sale goes on, with information about which dates, or which areas of your seat map, are selling out. Advising users in the queue about availability will take pressure off your ticketing system by speeding up the average user journey, and stop them from clicking around the site fruitlessly.
5: Let autotune control the user flow
When it comes to user flow, a ticket on-sale is really a play in three acts.
The first act is where the most aggressive users get through – and this is where many ticketing sites struggle, as these initial visitors try and get the best tickets they can, as fast as they can.
In the second act, availability starts to wane and, as the best seats sell out, people start taking their time to look for seats they're happy with. During this second act, the speed of transactions slows down, and you may be able to accommodate more users.
In the third act, availability is so scarce that people now have trouble booking seats, because they're fighting over the last few. If you're lucky enough to sell out, this final act can add pressure to your ticketing system as multiple users try to add the same few seats to their carts at the same time. If you don’t sell out, a third-wave of tyre kickers enters around this time, and most ticketing paths can handle quite a few of those.
So how do you manage this ebb and flow? It’s hard to judge manually. If you feed people in at a steady rate, you're probably at risk of having the rate too high at the start, and maybe the end, but lower than it needs to be in the middle.
The simple answer? Let autotune figure it out, based on how your pages are responding.
6: It's not over until...
When your on-sale has finished, you can remove your special-purpose waiting room, and return your general-purpose waiting room to 'business as usual'. But we don't recommend removing the waiting room function altogether: having generic protection in place on all your URLs is always a good idea for unexpected emergencies.
Unexpected emergencies, you say? Yes – in fact, I'll leave you with a true story.
A young entrepreneur – we’ll call him John – had taken on the job of ticketing for a new festival. Knowing that the post-lockdown event would be a big deal, he did the sensible thing: he signed up to CrowdHandler and set up a waiting room to handle the initial rush as soon as tickets became available.
Indeed, as soon as the festival tickets went on sale, there was a big spike in traffic. The waiting room handled it, and the site worked smoothly.
After the initial on-sale, ticket sales died down. Job done! However – more by accident than design – John left the waiting room in place.
And it's lucky he did, because three weeks later, without warning, the festival organisers announced that a hugely popular DJ was joining the lineup. The surprise social media post generated a huge surge, much bigger than the initial announcement, as thousands more people rushed to the site to book tickets for the event.
Without John needing to lift a finger (although we imagine there were some gestures made), the general waiting room kicked in and kept everything running smoothly. Festivalgoers booked their tickets, CrowdHandler dealt with the traffic and the site stayed up.
Expecting post-lockdown demand?
Expecting post-lockdown demand? Thinking about a waiting room option for your ticket on-sales?