[UPDATED] The digital marketing and sales mantra of being available anywhere and everywhere your fans are, is evolving. Music, tickets and merch, not only has to be accessible; it has to be easy to purchase. Every extra click and keystroke leads to diminished sales. Braintree is working to solve that problem; and with an expanding Eventbrite partnership, is bringing contextual commerce to DIY ticketing.
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What Braintree refers to as contextual commerce, Eventbrite dubs distributed commerce. Whatever the name, it’s commerce that enables users to seamlessly purchase products and services where they already are spending time online. Unquestionably, this is the purchasing behavior of the future.
In ticketing, Eventbrite has partnered with Facebook and Bandsintown to allow fans to purchase tickets to events directly within those sites and apps. Fans aren’t forced down some redirect rabbit hole to another site to buy tickets which often leads to shopping cart abandonment and lower sales.
PayPal owned Braintree works with Facebook, Bandsintown and others to securely receive users’ payment information during checkout and then store it in the Braintree Vault. Using their commerce infrastructure tools, those platforms extend their vaults by granting special tokens to Eventbrite so that they can run the transaction behind the scenes, even though the ticket purchaser’s checkout experience occurs entirely on Facebook or Bandsintown.
Sound complex and geeky? It is. But for fans buying tickets, its means smoother sailing from discovery to sitting in the front row.
Twice As Many Tickets Sold + Seamless RFID Payments
The stats speak for themselves.
Events where the full transaction takes place directly on Facebook move 2x the number of tickets than if the ticket-buyer is redirected to complete the purchase, according to Eventbrite. Since launch, Eventbrite has sold over 1 million tickets through distributed commerce channels across all of its partners.
Taking contextual selling one step further, Eventbrite is also leveraging Braintree’s platform to support seamless RFID payments at events and festivals. That means event wristbands act as tickets; and now, with the help of Braintree, as event-goers’ wallets, as well.