Challenge

Los Angeles-based event technology company, TixTrack, is committed to making the ticketing experience easy for its clients—some of the world’s largest theaters, museums, attractions, and immersive experiences—and for the people excited to attend their next show or see their next exhibit.

TixTrack began as a small seat-allocation provider, giving venues the ability to visualize and assign seats as customers purchased tickets through another vendor. In 2013, the company expanded into a full-scale ticketing platform that supported all of its clients’ event ticket sales. To make this transition possible, TixTrack needed a payment processing partner that would help it onboard and manage clients with a wide range of needs and customers and enable those clients to accept a wide variety of in-person payment methods.

Stripe was the natural choice. “We view ourselves as a software company that chose ticketing as our vertical,” Tixtrack CEO Steven Sunshine said. “We saw Stripe as a software company that chose payments. We share a similar approach to rapid development and releases, so we knew we were growing in the same direction.”

After nearly a decade with Stripe Connect, which gave TixTrack clients the ability to manage their payments in their own accounts, the company had built unique accounts for each of its clients. “The onboarding process we had in place was bespoke,” said Sean Free, COO of TixTrack. “No matter what a client’s previous payment experience was like, we had to help manage the transition away from their legacy systems, and managing cash flow in and out of accounts that were all designed differently was a lot to handle.”

As TixTrack continued to scale, reporting on these individual accounts took increasingly more time—and the team wanted to consolidate account management and reporting, from onboarding to payout and beyond. Reporting on each unique account was manual and tedious, and—since payouts for each client were unique—it was also a constant task.
In addition to managing its payment portal and internal reporting, TixTrack also needed to provide its clients with a customizable platform that supported how and where they accepted payments and sold tickets.

Customization is especially important for venues that want to offer as many payment options as possible to avoid friction in the purchasing experience. This includes supporting in-person sales, since live events are an inherently in-person experience and many of TixTrack’s clients generate a large portion of their sales from on-site box-office purchases.

To create an omnichannel events-based ticketing platform, TixTrack needed to provide physical readers for box-office purchases. “There’s so much more being transacted online, but box offices are a critical element of our industry,” Sunshine said. “None of our clients can operate without a box office.”

Solution

The first step to scale TixTrack’s payments infrastructure was to build a more consistent client experience. Previously, some TixTrack clients had unique onboarding flows and separate reports that TixTrack had to manage ad hoc. Now, onboarding is consistent from user to user, and the company has global accounts at a platform level that it can manage and review as a whole rather than client by client.

This frees up TixTrack to unify onboarding, reporting, management, and payouts—and give its clients much more control. “Being able to onboard and manage accounts in a consistent place is a big benefit for us because it helps us with managing our clients’ money, and they know that their money is protected until it’s time to be paid out to them,” Free said.

Each business using the TixTrack platform is unique in how they accept payments, sell tickets, and interact with customers, and TixTrack uses Connect to meet those users where they are in their payments journey. “Our clients all have different levels of sophistication and ideas of how payments should work,” Sunshine said. “Connect offers us the flexibility to provide solutions and deal structures that can be tailored extensively to each client and their unique needs.”

From an internal perspective, Connect was able to save TixTrack’s team hours of manual reporting work by unifying reports across regions rather than on an account-by-account basis. “Unless I had access to every individual Connect account, reporting from our existing Stripe Dashboard felt impossible,” Free said. “At the end of the day, Stripe is the source of truth when it comes to our money, and now I can get a quick snapshot view of where our business is at any given time from our platform accounts.”

For TixTrack, a truly unified payment-management experience required card-present transactions. To best meet the needs of in-person, live entertainment, it added Stripe Terminal to its payment toolkit. “In live entertainment, we have very human moments of someone buying a ticket from a box office,” Free said. “Particularly in places like New York City, Chicago, or Las Vegas, there’s an enormous amount of foot traffic. Our clients absolutely have to be able to help those guests, and it’s great to be able to fulfill that need with Terminal.”

Whether a Broadway attendee buys a ticket online or a museum visitor walks up to the box office, Terminal also enables box offices to offer additional payment options, such as Tap to Pay, Afterpay, Klarna, and more, to increase guest conversion rates.

Results

175+ managed accounts consolidated into a single, secure platform to scale payments

Consolidating account management across TixTrack’s growing client base has enabled the company to scale its services with both new and existing clients. With Stripe, TixTrack can offer its clients greater contract flexibility with customizable payout periods and simple onboarding, while continuing to offer new ways to manage payments as TixTrack grows. “We have successful clients that decide to add different locations for events or attractions. Supporting and retaining [those clients] is a great growth opportunity for us,” Free said. “We depend on Stripe to handle spikes [in] sales with reliability and fast transaction speeds, and get people in and out [of] the door. This means we’re helping our users grow their business while growing our own, alongside Stripe.”

20+ hours of weekly reporting work reduced to under an hour

Account reconciliation and reporting once took the TixTrack team hours of work. Running reports manually for each account was time consuming—but with Connect, the team has evolved its global reporting into a single source of truth. “Today, we have multiple platform accounts—one each in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia,” Free said. “Because of that change, I only have to run four reports, take those results, and meld them together to see a global view as opposed to hundreds of individual account reports.”

With Terminal, the team was able to consolidate its reporting even further. By offering point-of-sale hardware to its global box offices, TixTrack can track a fully omnichannel solution on a single platform. “Being able to have a single place to track all the hardware, monitor hardware provision, and connect its use to online sales is hugely valuable as we expand,” Sunshine said.

Offering more payment flexibility to improve ticket sales

Since 15%—50% of TixTrack’s clients’ sales occur in person at box-office windows, TixTrack quickly adopted Terminal to give its clients the ability to offer new payment methods—whether their guests are online or in person. Lowering the barrier to entry for ticket sales by offering more options helps both TixTrack and its customers grow. “Historically, ticketing conversion rates were pretty poor, especially on mobile devices. Maintaining a high conversion rate is critical—and for us, flexibility of payments is a huge piece of that,” Sunshine said.