Challenge

When Japan’s live entertainment market reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic, it came back at full force. Festivals sold out, venues filled to capacity, and artists who had spent two years streaming from studios were back onstage. Zaiko had weathered the pandemic by pivoting to paid live streaming. As in-person events returned, Zaiko was selling tickets for both online streams and live shows, but its technology only covered half the picture.

Zaiko sold tickets online up to the night before an event. But once fans arrived at the venue, Zaiko’s system stopped at the door. The venue handled day-of tickets, a separate company managed merchandise for the artist, and yet another operator ran food and drinks. Each had its own system, and the on-site experience was slow. Zaiko could sell a ticket in seconds online. At the venue, fans were lining up to buy drink tickets with cash from entirely separate systems.

Zaiko’s understanding of its customers’ purchasing activity ended at the ticket sale. The company could see that a customer bought a ticket, but had no way of knowing that the same person spent ¥200,000 on merchandise at the venue. Each operator’s sales sat in a silo, invisible to the others. Without cross-touchpoint data, Zaiko could not build a picture of what attendees actually spent, and could not use that information to market to them across events.

Solution

COO Sach Jobb had been thinking about the on-site problem for roughly a year. Zaiko had built on Stripe since 2015, starting with online ticket sales and expanding into Konbini, Alipay, WeChat Pay, subscriptions, and cross-border payments as the business grew. When Jobb and CTO Andrew Winter learned Stripe Terminal was coming to Japan, they moved immediately.

Winter built a single app on Terminal that handles every on-site transaction: day-of tickets, merchandise, drinks, parking, and anything else the event operator wants to sell. With Tap to Pay on iPhone, venue staff can now accept card payments on their phones without additional hardware.

The app solves the back-office problem, too. Each vendor sees only its own sales and settlement data, so the venue, the merchandise company, the food-and-drink team, and parking operations each get accurate reporting for their share of the business. But all the data feeds into Zaiko’s platform, giving the company full visibility across every transaction at an event.

At a recent festival, Winter watched how attendees moved through the venue, and he identified bottlenecks as they happened. Using Expo and AI-assisted coding, he pushed updates to the app and redeployed on the spot.

“I was using Claude to fix things in real time,” said Winter. “It was very fast with Terminal.”

Results

Zaiko captured four revenue streams at Rainbow Disco Club through a single app

Winter coded the initial prototype in 72 hours; the production version took a month. The proof of concept went live at an event shortly after, processing Tap to Pay on iPhone transactions.

The first full production deployment launched at Rainbow Disco Club, a multiday outdoor festival in Izu. Entrance staff, parking staff, and bar staff each use the same app with role-based reporting, so each company sees only its own settlement data while Zaiko sees the full picture.

Tap to Pay drink sales replaced cash queues in two days

At many Japanese concerts, attendees queue at the entrance to buy drink tickets with cash. The lines are slow, and the process pulls fans away from the event before it even starts. Zaiko built and deployed Tap to Pay drink purchasing in two days.

Unified view of spend across channels enabled remarketing

With every transaction flowing through Zaiko’s platform, the company can now see the full spend of a single attendee across channels at an event. “If someone bought a ticket and then spent ¥200,000 on merchandise at the venue, we’d never have known that before,” said Jobb. Jobb plans to extend this unified view across multiple events, building customer profiles that show total lifetime spend.

Winter described the next step with an example: an attendee wants to buy a T-shirt at a concert, but most sizes are sold out. With purchase data captured, Zaiko could send that fan to its online store with a QR code and make the sale after the show.