NO TICKET REQUIRED — The Veritix Blog

We hear over and over that fans are looking for a flexible ticketing system that offers them options on how they manage their tickets. Our Flash Seats® paperless ticketing system meets this need by providing an unparalleled set of features and services to our users.  Flash Seats® has been designed to cater to fans’ needs  by creating an innovative system that makes ticket management easy and safe.  Here is a quick glance at the many ways fans can use and take advantage of the benefits of the Flash Seats system:

Buy, Sell, and Transfer Tickets in an Easy-to-Use System

• Flash Seats allows you to easily buy, sell, and transfer tickets through our paperless system.
• Flash Seats is essentially a portal to effectively manage ticket inventory.
• Fans can track the history of purchases, transfers, and sales and the contacts they send tickets to.
• Sellers can instantly sell tickets by setting up auto-sell parameters. They can also change the parameters (e.g., ask price, seller notes, expiration times) at any time prior to the tickets selling.
• Seat holders can change or update registered IDs associated with seats.

The Ultimate Convenience

• Fans can conveniently swipe in on event day with an registered, electronic ID, eliminating lost or misplaced tickets.
• Seats can instantly be transferred online to other fans, friends, or family members at anytime, even after the event has started. Transfers can be treated individually or as a group. Once tickets are transferred, people can add their own IDs and enter the event whenever they want, without waiting for the whole party to arrive.
• Fans can take advantage of one-stop shopping by visiting one marketplace for tickets to all their favorite events. The team or venue endorses the marketplace, making it easily accessible to fans looking to buy seats.
• Fans have the opportunity to sell unused tickets and buy seats to events that are sold out.

Secure System for Fans

• Seats are bought and sold within a secure environment that is backed by the team or venue, eliminating the possibility of fans buying counterfeit or phantom tickets.
• The anonymous, secure Flash Seats marketplace handles all transactions directly, avoiding the cycle of money arrangements between parties.
• The marketplace shows the real-time value of tickets in the marketplace, which helps inform and protect buyers and sellers.

Twitter provides a great avenue for people to discuss various topics and give input on what their stance on a particular subject is. Recently, various members of the ticketing industry held a discussion on Twitter about paperless ticketing. #Ticketchat was used as the hashtag for the conversation, allowing people to follow the comments in real-time.

Some of the concerns brought up about paperless ticketing in the chat revolved around ticketing systems and the fact that many systems restrict fans from giving their tickets to someone else. However, Venues Today’s Dave Brooks (@venues2dave) was quick to point out that Flash Seats^®, the Veritix paperless ticketing platform, allows transferability.

“Well #paperlessticketing has to be transferable @veritix gets this. Until you can share tix, people won’t adopt #ticketchat” – @venues2dave

With the “Transfer” feature, fans electronically send their tickets to other people by simply entering the recipient’s email address. The recipient then creates an account and adds an electronic ID to swipe on the day of the event. It’s just that easy.

We are happy that the ticketing industry is engaging in discussions about paperless ticketing systems and raising important issues, and we are pleased that Flash Seats is recognized as a fan-friendly system.

As CEO of Veritix™, I can appreciate the challenges for venues and teams as they try to understand how the secondary market affects the primary market and fits into their overall ticketing strategy. I’d like to offer some thoughts for you to consider as you assess the impact of the secondary market on your business.

There are five decades of financial market data showing that a secondary market ALWAYS enhances a primary market IF THE PRIMARY GOODS ARE PRICED AT MARKET.  This is true for commodities and futures that have fixed “event” dates just like concerts and games as well as less-perishable inventory.

Here’s what the data shows:

-   If prices are equal, buyers prefer to buy from the original seller because their confidence is increased.  Even a marginal increase in purchase confidence is enough to determine the choice of seller.  If prices are not equal, then price considerations will dominate.

-   This means that if your primary tickets are priced at market, buyers will prefer to buy them from you.  Assuming you have a secondary market that imposes fees (~25% is common), your primary sales should have a considerable price advantage when fees are factored in.

-    However, if the primary tickets are priced above market, then the secondary prices (at market) will be sufficiently below primary prices to motivate secondary purchases even though buyer confidence is lower.

This is the point – real fan behavior through actual purchases (not hopeful intent) reveals the market price. That’s the definition of a “market price” – the price people are willing to pay. If your primary ticket prices are above market, you won’t successfully sell them to most fans.  It’s a fallacy to think that because 1,000 tickets sell in the secondary, that the same 1,000 tickets would have sold in the primary at above market prices.

[Please don’t take my word for it – libraries of data are available dating back to inception of the modern exchange era in the middle of the last century.]

Third-party marketplaces like brokers, scalpers, and online markets reveal market prices to fans regardless of what you do.  You can’t swim upstream against that, and you can’t hope for consumer ignorance, especially in the Internet era. 

The good news is that secondary markets enhance primary markets.  Why?  They give primary prospects MORE CONFIDENCE – confidence that, if they can’t use the good or service, it can be resold to someone who can put it to use.  Since consumer confidence is a key decision factor for market-priced goods, the result is substantial.  Secondary markets always increase primary market sales volume and transaction rate. 

What to do?

If you accept that third-party markets exist (they do), and that consumers therefore have easy access to market prices (they do, now in real-time on mobile devices), then what becomes critical is for ticket sellers to understand the MARKET PRICE in REAL TIME, and to use it to MAXIMIZE PRIMARY TICKET SALES.  To do this, you need what all modern electronic markets EXCEPT ticketing have – a “Bloomberg Terminal” – the modern equivalent of a stock ticker.  You need to have real-time information on how fans value a given event so that you can maximize your yield by setting (and adjusting) pricing appropriately.

This has happened in all other electronic markets EXCEPT ticketing because the industry has been dominated by one ticketing provider.  However, technology marches on for both consumers and businesses.  Teams like the Rockets and Cavaliers recognize this and have hired people with specific expertise in analytics and yield management, arming them with data from their branded marketplaces.  Artists like Billy Joel, Elton John, Britney Spears, and Roger Waters recognize that it is far better to embrace the secondary market and its data than to pretend a secondary market doesn’t exist.

This offers many opportunities and has many implications:

  -   Having your own ticket marketplace gives you the “Bloomberg Terminal” necessary to maximize yield. 

  -   Having your own branded ticket marketplace means your fans have a single connection point with the venue or team. 

  -   Your branded ticket marketplace offers higher consumer confidence because you are the issuer, so it has an advantage over other secondary marketplaces. 
As a result, you could opt to charge higher secondary fees, or to charge market fees and take a disproportionate share of the secondary  market share for your inventory.

  -   Pre-sales take on a whole new function in this era – by seeding the market with select inventory, they provide critical data necessary to appropriately price later, larger “public” releases.  This means that pre-sale inventory should be chosen with an eye toward informing market pricing of the rest of the inventory.

  -   Ticket marketplaces don’t need to be secondary-only.  Releasing inventory at market prices is acceptable to the public as long as it isn’t a hidden practice.  It is the natural evolution of the baby-step that “dynamic pricing” represents.

Based on the empirical evidence available, there is only one logical conclusion:  Embracing the secondary marketplace is necessary to maximize revenue and margin.

Last week, Venues Today one of the industry’s leading magazines, posted a podcast focusing on the paperless ticketing revolution. Dave Brooks, senior writer at Venues Today, analyzes the way Veritix™, among others, is moving paperless technology forward and providing event goers with exactly what they are looking for  — simplicity, security, convenience and transferability. The podcast is one of the most comprehensive and best descriptions of the use of Veritix’s Flash Seats® and takes the next steps to describe Flash Seats’ ability to transfer tickets, re-sell tickets and collect data that will enhance the fan experience.

Click on the link to download and listen to the podcast: http://venuestoday.mypodcast.com/

Bieber fever is sweeping the nation and Justin’s young fans can’t get enough of the pop star.  As many parents are finding out, pulling out their credit cards to treat their children to tickets for the hottest show in town has become more of a hassle than an ease of convenience.  To their astonishment, they are the ones being forced to actually attend the Bieber concert, not their young ones.

Why is this the case?

Because Ticketmaster’s digital offering is non-transferable.  If you use your credit card, you end up having to attend the show.  Ticketmaster’s paperless ticket policy requires the credit card holder to be present at the event with their ID and credit card.  No exchange of giving your credit card to another person is allowed.  Here’s a recent story from an unlucky fan that did not experience convenience with Ticketmaster’s non-transferable paperless platform.

(http://www.ticketnews.com/features/wire/toronto-sun/Canadian-Justin-Bieber-fan-struggles-with-paperless-tickets ).

This is the PERFECT example to illustrate one of the fundamental differences between Ticketmaster and Veritix™.  Our Flash Seats® ticketing system – the only patented, integrated digital ticketing system that provides primary and secondary ticketing services — allows for easy transferability and seat management.  All actions to send seats to another person or party can be done online through a Flash Seats® account.  We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, it is a very simple process:

1.)    Purchase a ticket online with your credit card.

2.)    Log into your Flash Seats® account and select the “Transfer” button next to your seats.  Type in the recipient’s email address.

3.)    An email is automatically sent to the recipient, prompting them to sign up for a Flash Seats® account . 

4.)    The recipient then adds either a credit card, driver’s license, student ID or other form of electronic ID for entry.

Done.  They show up, they use their credit card, driver’s license, student ID or other form of electronic ID and they are in.  Additionally, if the transferee needs to make changes to an ID, they can do so by logging back into their Flash Seats® account and editing their ID information.  Simplicity and convenience at its finest.

Once more?  Okay…purchase…transfer…sign up for account…add ID.  Done.  The whole process takes about three minutes.

Digital ticketing has taken some criticism and at Veritix we are fighting everyday to make sure people know that there is an option with easy transferability for digital ticketing.  If we can save just one parent a day from forcibly attending a concert, we feel we have done our job.  Bieber fever should be enjoyed by our children, not provide us with a Bieber headache.

When the Miley Cyrus Tour decided to go paperless in 2008, it raised a few eyebrows in the ticketing industry. The end result of the tour revealed the future of ticketing, a future that reverberates the term “paperless.”

Paperless ticketing is a technology that is changing the game.  We can attest to this as our paperless Flash Seats® system has processed more than two million paperless tickets at various venues across the country.

The term “paperless” is often misinterpreted because it is being used as an overall description of digital ticketing systems – like Xerox for copy machines. However, there is a huge difference when you use the term “paperless” and Flash Seats®.

Recently, there has been a great deal of attention on the digital paperless ticketing industry, particularly in New York and New Jersey, with actual legislation being written that focuses on keeping transferability and the re-sale of tickets fair and convenient for the ticket purchaser.

The irony is that there really isn’t a need at all for legislation if ticket sellers/purchasers are using Flash Seats®. The Flash Seats® system has the following capabilities:

1. A platform that is convenient and secure. Fans can access their password-protected online account from anywhere they have Internet access—a computer or web-enabled phone.
2. With Flash Seats®, fans can buy, sell, or transfer tickets at any time – even right up until the start of an event, and in some cases,after an event has started — online and through a team/venue/artist endorsed site.
3. A customized, individually-branded, open and competitive secondary marketplace. This competition threatens the current secondary ticket providers (StubHub, Razor Gator, Tickets Now , etc.), because it gives fans another (and better) source for tickets. It also nullifies claims that paperless ticketing raises prices.
4. Buyers and sellers set the prices they are willing to pay or take for tickets. This consolidated marketplace provides convenient price discovery, improves competition and is the epitome of dynamic pricing. This also provides additional revenue for the venues, teams or artists using Flash Seats® because they have taken the third party out.
5. Another advantage of Flash Seats® is that it increases customer service. Our clients report a customer satisfaction rating of 95%. Fans cite ease and convenience of use and the fact that they know that they are going to utilize 100% of their tickets – through use, transfer or re-sale – as the best features of Flash Seats®.
6. Flash Seats® ensures that fans get the tickets they paid for instantly, nearly eliminating the problems that many using other paperless ticketing systems experience – fraudulent tickets, doubling selling seats, phantom seats (buying tickets to seats that don’t exist). And if there are ever problems, Flash Seats® provides opportunity to immediately address the issue.
7. Flash Seats® is the only system that collects data and gives the team/venue/artist that is using it the ability to take advantage of valuable marketing data about who is actually buying tickets and attending the events. Obviously, this information is extremely valuable to the venues and artists as they work hard to build relationships with their fans and extend the lifecycle of the fan experience.

Understandably, the industry is talking about the increasing viability of paperless ticketing. But it’s important to understand that all paperless ticketing is not created equal. At Flash Seats®, we’ve seen first-hand the power of technology and have worked hard to create the best platform in the business and the advantages of Flash Seats® are hard to ignore.

We tell people all the time how easy it is to transfer tickets to friends or family using Flash Seats®. Here’s how it works:

1. Log into your account, click Tickets, find the tickets you want to transfer, and click Transfer.
2. Once you complete the transfer information, Flash Seats sends the tickets to the email address you entered.
3. If people you transfer tickets to already have a Flash Seats account, they don’t need to do anything; the tickets go right into their account. If not, they need to register for Flash Seats, which takes just a few minutes, and the tickets are then placed into their Flash Seats account.

That’s it! People who receive tickets from you in a transfer can enter the event simply by showing whatever form of electronic ID (credit card, driver’s license) they entered when they set up their Flash Seats account.

We recently had this conversation with a prominent industry reporter, but he really didn’t fully understand it until we ran him through a demo. We walked him through setting up an account. We sent him two paperless tickets for an event, which were automatically placed into his account.

In the course of a ten-minute conversation, we transferred the tickets to four different people in three different states. When we were done, here’s what he said:

“Truly impressive.  Remarkably better than the competition.”

We agree.