Ticket Tailor is a leading event ticketing platform that allows event organizers to create event pages, sell tickets online, manage event registrations and check-in attendees. Founded in 2010 by Jonny White, Ticket Tailor is now positioned as the world’s leading independent ticketing platform selling over 5m tickets per year.
In what has been a disruptive time for the world of events, we were interested to speak to Jonny about how Ticket Tailor weathered the storm of 2020 and what the future looks like for the industry. Before we got to that, we kicked-off by asking him what led to him founding Ticket Tailor…
What led you to start Ticket Tailor?
I’ve always loved music and used to run events at university. When I first started running these events the only way I could sell tickets meant paying huge fees to ticketing platforms or agents — I always felt that it was unfair that they ended up with so much of the ticket price when we were putting in all the effort to run the actual event itself.
Aside from my passion for music, I also loved tech and building new things, so I decided to combine these passions and to develop a simple ticketing solution for my events — therefore taking out the inconvenient middleman.
It went quite well and a few other local events saw what I was doing and asked me to build them similar ticketing solutions. It soon started to seem inefficient to build a new ticketing solution for every client, so I set about creating a platform that would allow anyone to create their own online box office, pay very low fees and ensure as much money as possible could be spent on making their events great. That’s how Ticket Tailor was born.
Over 10 years later and the core principles remain the same – we just have quite a few more events nowadays!
I see on your website that you work with over 10,000 event organizers a year – how have you managed to grow to that size?
The single most successful way we’ve grown is our event organizers recommending Ticket Tailor to friends, colleagues and peers in the industry. That means we know most of the hard work is done by exceeding the expectations of our users when they use our product and interact with our team.
Aside from that, we prioritized building integrations and plug-ins for popular CMS and web-building tools so users could sell tickets on WordPress, embed our ticket selling widget on Squarespace and promote events on Wix. Prominence in their directories helped us get discovered by people looking for ticket-selling solutions.
There are many ticketing platforms out there – how do you differentiate yourselves?
It’s a great question. Every event has slightly different requirements, feature requests and pricing concerns. And as a platform that works with events across the entire industry, we aim to cater to as many of their needs as possible.
To give you a flavor of our users – at Ticket Tailor we have music festivals selling tickets for 40,000 people, conferences with 5,000 tickets and tourist attractions with over 100,000 tickets per year, right the way through to charity fundraisers for 50 people or less. We believe every user is as important as each other, so we focus on the following things:
- Keeping our fees the lowest in the industry
- Ensuring our product is simple and intuitive to use without sacrificing the number of features or functionality
- Providing exceptional customer support for everyone — no matter how big or small the event, we aim to respond to any query within 5 minutes (and usually do a lot better)
Finally, we’re proud to be an independent business. This is maybe an unusual thing to differentiate on, but for us, it’s crucial to our identity and what makes us different.
How does being an independent business impact your customers?
Firstly, it gives us a deeper understanding of our users. Most event organizers are independent businesses, entrepreneurs, creatives and people who are often defying the odds to put on their events. We know a bit about how that feels!
Practically speaking, it means that we don’t have to worry about what investors or shareholders want – and we can focus solely on what our event organizers need from us.
This translates to fair fees, constant investment in our product and exceptional customer support.
Ticket Tailor’s pricing is quite unique in the industry – how did you end up with that model?
The ticketing world can sometimes be full of the dark arts of negotiating – where no one really knows if they have a good deal or are paying over the odds. What’s more – complicated contracts and exclusivity can make choosing the right platform a real burden for event organizers.
We have done away with that traditional approach and instead focus on transparency and simplicity.
Our Pre pay pricing allows event organizers to access incredibly low per-ticket fees by purchasing ticket credits upfront. These credits never expire, meaning that we make it super easy for everyone to benefit from these rates.
We also have Pay as you go pricing for events that prefer not to pay upfront.
Charities, PTAs and B-corps all get a 20% discount on these fees, and free tickets are free of charge.
What was the effect of the pandemic on Ticket Tailor?
It certainly wasn’t the 2020 we were expecting! Our two main markets, North America and Europe, were amongst the hardest hit regions and have experienced long and severe lockdowns in an effort to limit the impact of Covid-19. Though we saw sales drop severely, by the end of the year we managed to be selling more tickets than at the start — so we felt really encouraged by that result.
How did you respond as a business?
We always aimed to be known as the ticketing company that puts event organizers first and the pandemic has been an opportunity to really showcase that to our users. As a team we spent a lot of time figuring out the best way we can use our time and resources and ended up with the following approach:
Supporting online and virtual events to sell tickets
It quickly became apparent that selling tickets for online events would play a significant role in 2020, it would also provide a lifeline for event organizers looking to earn a salary during these difficult times. We took the decision to make our platform free for all virtual and online events in 2020. We ended up selling 500,000 tickets for over 25,000 events and all of our fees were waived, allowing event organizers to earn maximum revenue.
We also launched new features for online events, so users could sell tickets for streamed events on platforms like Zoom, YouTube and Vimeo. It’s been awesome seeing how adaptable the event industry is and we now see 100s of online events listed every day; from online comedy gigs to virtual food foraging courses and Broadway singalongs.
Features to allow socially distanced events
Events are probably going to look a little different for quite a while and we wanted to ensure that our event organizers could sell tickets safely via Ticket Tailor. So we reprioritized our product roadmap and launched a raft of features that have proved vital to opening venues and events safely. For example:
- Sell tickets using seating charts and reserved seating
- Socially distanced seating rules (e.g. if someone buys a seat then the adjacent seats are automatically made unavailable)
- Recurring events and time slot scheduling
- Calendar view for ticket buyers
These features have had huge uptake and we’ve seen a host of new parks, farms, museums and galleries signing up to Ticket Tailor in order to manage capacity. We’ve also had 5,000 seater venues looking to reopen safely with our platform. It’s been really exciting seeing these users signing up and using our platform to sell tickets for their events.
Finally, we provided tons of information and resources
Many event organizers felt isolated and confused about how to respond to the pandemic and what it meant for their events. So in response, we initially created The Event Creators Collective as a forum to share what was happening in everyone’s individual parts of the industry. A series of webinars brought our users together in a really practical and supportive way.
Since then we’ve been providing data on how the events industry is responding to Covid-19 as well as a huge number of articles on how to adapt to the changing world of events.
Looking forward – what do you see as the major changes to the industry?
We’re really optimistic that the events industry will bounce back, and we certainly know that the public will be ready to buy tickets for events once it’s safe to do so.
The main trend we’re seeing at the moment is a surge of event organizers turning to online ticketing for the first time. Whereas before they may have made do with selling tickets on the door, people are finding it no longer makes sense — managing capacity, taking payment securely and giving confidence to ticket buyers is all made possible using platforms like Ticket Tailor.
Aside from this, we see the following things happening:
- More frequent events with lower capacity — managed by time slots and recurring event features
- More seated and social bubble events — with the use of seating charts to maintain social distancing
- More hybrid events — as events come back there will be an increased need to keep virtual audience members engaged if they can’t travel to the event in person
- Drive-in events to stay — they were a necessity during lockdowns and demand was through the roof, this meant people fell back in love with this retro night out and we think they are here to stay!
Our recent article on event trends for 2021 expands on these further.
What are the key features that Ticket Tailor users are excited about at the moment?
2020 saw us launch more features than ever before. 2021 is already shaping up to see more releases as we grow our product and tech team to deliver a host of new and exciting features.
I can’t reveal everything we’re working on right now, but one thing that the team is looking at as we speak is the development of our open API. We launched a beta version in early 2020 and it got some great feedback. This year we want to take it to the next level with webhooks so that people can find new and inventive ways of helping Ticket Tailor power their events.
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