We’ve all been through the process of buying tickets online via a platform that’s downright unpleasant to use. If you’re honest, maybe this describes your current online sales platform a little too well.
But what exactly should a modern event management & ticketing platform offer? The short answer is a better experience for ticket buyers and event hosts alike. And the ability to sell more tickets with fewer ticketing fees wouldn’t hurt, either.
6 Critical Features of Top-Tier Event Ticketing Platforms
Let’s dive a little deeper and explore six of the must-have features of a modern event ticketing platform— plus how Lyte shines in each.
Flexible Ticket Tiers and Buying Experiences
To qualify as a top-performing event ticketing platform, a solution needs the flexibility to provide exactly what you want to offer to your fans. For example, you may want to offer reserved seating or multiple tiers of tickets, each with its own inventory and separate set of perks. Or you may want to offer your fans the ability to pool their resources and request a group of tickets, all seated or lodged together.
A premium flex ticket that’s guaranteed returnable offers the peace of mind that fans are looking for in this pandemic era, as is the peace of mind that tickets can be rolled over in the case of a canceled or postponed event.
Everything we’ve just described is stuff that Lyte can do with ease. Lyte offers unprecedented flexibility in terms of how you structure ticket sales and how your fans buy them. We even offer payment plans that are fully refundable if defaulted. (And our intelligent metrics allow you to instantly resell that seat!)
Intelligent Insights for Event Marketers and Venues
We live in a connected world where data is king. This is true in event marketing just like everywhere else, to the point that even a sold-out show could still be a partial failure if you don’t gain the necessary insights from ticket-buying trends.
The best event ticketing platforms offer robust insights and metrics on how your sales are going all throughout the sales cycle. With Lyte, you get this kind of robust reporting, including rich metrics on who bought what. Did your VIP package sell out in 30 minutes, or was it the last thing to fill up? Were your upgrade options in high demand?
By gaining access to this kind of metric data, you can learn from your successes (and your not-so-successes). With Lyte, you can learn in real-time from what worked (and what didn’t) so you can sell more tickets and make the next event even more successful, start to finish.
Anti-Scalping Technology
The unauthorized resale market has caused significant problems in the events industry in recent years. Scalpers have evolved way past standing outside stadiums and reselling unused tickets at a markup. We’ve seen events in the past few years where digital scalpers configure bots to gobble up large shares of the available tickets with the express purpose of reselling them at sometimes obscene markups.
Now, it doesn’t have to be this way. The best ticketing system platforms and event ticketing software solutions include measures to prevent this kind of digital scalping. Lyte includes many such features. Let’s look closer at two of them and see how they discourage or prevent huge resale markup.
Fan-to-Fan Ticket Transfer or Sale
The whole secondary market is premised on the fact that life happens. People buy tickets, only to later discover that they cannot actually go for one of a million different reasons. Lyte’s Send feature puts the power into the hands of the ticket holder, allowing them to gift or sell their ticket to anyone, directly through Lyte. Lyte creates a link that the ticket holder can share however they want— with friends, on social, whatever.
By selling or gifting tickets directly through Lyte’s user-friendly interface (often from a mobile device), there’s no possibility of getting sold a fake ticket and getting stopped at the gate. The original ticket holder gets their money back, and the new ticket holder gets to attend an event that may otherwise be sold out.
Ability to Return Tickets
The ability to return tickets is another impressive anti-scalping feature. There’s no need to sell your ticket for pennies on the dollar to some resale site or shady character who’s going to flip it for a huge profit. With Lyte, fans can return a ticket in a sold-out category and receive a dynamic, fair market value for it. Then another fan can buy that ticket through Lyte for market value — not some insane scalper’s markup.
Dynamic Postponement, Cancellation Features & Top-Tier Customer Support
As the US cautiously emerges from COVID-19-induced lockdowns and cancellations, fans and ticket holders are understandably guarded. Even if they aren’t worried about COVID, they’re worried that the festival they want to attend could get postponed or canceled . . . again.
Any top-tier event ticketing platform must support robust features for handling postponement and cancellations. And these features need to be automated, taking some of the pressure off customer service reps, event hosts, and the event organizer. Most importantly, these features must preserve the cash flow of the event organizer, minimizing full-on refunds.
Lyte offers impressive features in this area. Roll Over lets fans push tickets from the canceled event over to the next one, keeping your cash flow stable and your box office happy. And our Swap feature allows fans to exchange a ticket type for another tier or date. We also offer a Donate feature, where fans can choose to donate some or all of their ticket cost to a fund of your choosing (like an employee relief fund).
Lyte: More Powerful and Flexible Ticketing Than Ever Before
We’ve looked at many of the must-have features for modern event ticketing software. In each of these areas, Lyte excels, beating the competition and providing a robust user-friendly ticketing experience. If you’re looking for a more powerful, more flexible way to sell tickets online and keep your ticket buyers delighted and engaged, you need Lyte.
Ready to see more? Schedule your demo now!