Challenge

SeatGeek launched as a ticket-pricing forecaster before emerging as a comprehensive search engine for ticketing. Today, SeatGeek’s platform makes it easy for fans to buy and sell tickets to the events they love and helps teams, leagues, and venues efficiently manage their box offices. As both a primary box office platform and resale marketplace, SeatGeek allows fans to resell their tickets to other fans. As fan-to-fan ticket reselling gained popularity, SeatGeek saw that its existing marketplace and payment processing architecture wasn’t adequately supporting the growth of their business.

SeatGeek’s primary challenge was that resolving payment and fulfillment issues between buyers and sellers was complex and inflexible. For example, applying discount or promotional codes on sales, or recouping funds from sellers for any unfulfilled orders, relied on burdensome back-office processes. The company’s existing payments provider didn’t offer a solution that could process discounts for buyers while still allowing sellers to receive the full asking price for their sold tickets.

Separately, the process of onboarding ticket sellers to SeatGeek was slow due to the compliance work flows in its existing system. In particular, they required sellers to spend a significant amount of time entering personal and financial information up front, such as banking information and their Social Security number, before being able to list tickets for resale. These requirements increased dropout rates from SeatGeek’s seller onboarding flow, inhibiting the listing and potential sale of more ticket inventory.

With these constraints in mind, SeatGeek wanted a new payment partner for its marketplace business that would automate manual processes and allow for quicker and more intuitive onboarding for fans to resell tickets, along with a flexible solution for fan discounts.

“We wanted to work with a best-in-class platform that could help us easily onboard sellers and meet our compliance needs, while also facilitating the efficient flow of money from buyers to sellers in our marketplace,” said Chris Sanger, VP of payments and compliance at SeatGeek.

In addition, SeatGeek was looking to optimize online payment processing for ticket buyers, specifically by improving credit card authorization rates and expanding the range of payment methods available to buyers.

Solution

In 2021, SeatGeek undertook an extensive search for a new payment processor for its marketplace, before ultimately settling on Stripe. “Stripe offered a superior mix of products, and we felt confident that they’d be able to grow with our scale,” said Sanger.

Stripe Connect proved to be the ideal solution, driving immediate value by improving the fan experience and supporting the growth of SeatGeek’s marketplace. Connect’s flexibility allowed SeatGeek to build a progressive onboarding flow: sellers can list their tickets with minimal information up-front—just name, phone number, email, and password (the basic information to create a SeatGeek account). Then, if and when the tickets are sold, sellers are asked to complete the onboarding process and provide more detailed information, such as bank account and routing numbers, or additional identity-verifying signals if listing or sale amounts exceed certain thresholds. Also, Connect’s custom integration uses a model to decouple pay-ins (charges) and payouts (transfers), making it seamless to offer discounts and promotions for buyers while ensuring that sellers collect the full asking price for their tickets.

Using Stripe Payments to process marketplace transactions gives SeatGeek access to Stripe authorization optimizations, including Adaptive Acceptance, which uses machine learning to identify optimized retry messaging and routing combinations to recover false declines. Stripe also supports more than 100 payment methods, making it easy for SeatGeek to add popular payment options like Affirm.

Results

Stripe Connect streamlines processes for sellers

Prior to switching to Stripe, SeatGeek sellers were burdened by a number of cumbersome processes, from onboarding to collecting payments and tax reporting. Connect has helped to streamline those processes, making it faster and easier for individuals to list and sell tickets.

Authorization rates improve thanks to Stripe Payments features

Under SeatGeek’s previous payment provider, authorization rates remained relatively low, in large part due to false declines. With the help of Adaptive Acceptance, authorization rates increased by over 1%.

“The increase of authorization rates has been a key success story with Stripe,” Sanger said.

Conversion rates and average order values increase thanks to new buy now, pay later capabilities

By adding Affirm through Stripe Payments, SeatGeek’s conversion rates have increased by as much as 2%. At the same time, order values for purchases made with Affirm are as much as 50% higher than purchases made with other payment methods.