TicketLeap Relaunches With Mobile Box Office & Easy Seating Chart Creation
With the recent direct ticketing success of Louis CK ticketing is back on the news agenda. But ticketing has been an incredibly active area of development on the web all along. TicketLeap's recent relaunch is an example of both ongoing development in the ticketing industry and improvements in ticketing services. Beyond a site redesign, TicketLeap has introduced such improvements as a mobile box office and drag-and-drop seating chart creation to serve both event organizers and attendees.
Philadelphia-based TicketLeap was founded in 2003 by Chris Stanchack as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School though it only became a fulltime business a few years later. Though TicketLeap caters to an international clientele, their roots in Philadelphia are particularly strong. For example, they provide ticketing for such major Philly events as the Annual Philadelphia Folk Festival whose page is an example of how they support offering a complex array of tickets for individual events.
They also provide ticketing for the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe whose page shows how they now bring together multiple events under one banner linking out to individual pages for each associated event. This multievent offering is a particularly strong aspect of the relaunch.
In addition to improving their services for large events, TicketLeap has also upped social sharing integrations on the site, something most companies seem to be doing now. More unique is their new "DIY drag-and-drop seating charts":
"which event organizers can generate directly in their web browser, allowing them to present customers with a visually accurate representation of their event’s seating layout quickly and without any additional upfront costs."
Unfortunately I couldn't find a working example of the seating charts for the events I checked out on the site but I think this is a big move in improving their services. Also important is their mobile box office that includes the ability to sell and redeem tickets using any iOS gadget and the ability to scan tickets at the venue using free Android or iOS apps.
Ticket sales and marketing analytics are another important aspect of the relaunch. Sales data is viewable in realtime and one can see which links are driving ticket purchases from other sites including social media:
"Its box-office software lets an organizer see if a post on someone’s Facebook page drove views of the event, and how many actually bought tickets as a result. Knowing this kind of information can help organizers decide whether to dole out VIP status, a free drink ticket or anything else to reward their most influential patrons."
In a recent interview, Chris Stanchak stated:
"The No. 1 thing that motivates someone to buy a ticket is because their friends are going. The way we look at it, the event used to start when the doors opened, but now it’s when the tickets go on sale."
In fact, approaches such as rewarding influential patrons and thinking of the event as starting when tickets go on sale due, in part, to social media seems to be where the online ticketing industry is headed. They remind me quite strongly of the ideas presented by FanFueled's CEO Anderson Bell both when they launched and later when they had more of a track record.
TicketLeap's current ticket list include lots of music-related events as do many other emerging services. And a lot of these services seem to offer an excellent array of features. While that makes it tough to be a competitor in the ticketing industry, event organizers are currently blessed with an abundance of no-cost services, funded by low ticket fees, that are increasingly tuned in to organizers' needs as well as those of ticket buyers.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch) blogs about business at Flux Research: Business Changes and about dance at All World Dance: News. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
