London Theatre Tickets On Line: an e-commerce case study (lecture 3, 2006)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 11, 2006 [4582 views]

Theatre tickets like flight tickets are excellent for selling online because of their low warehousing and fulfilment costs. Customers search the web for particular shows such as the Lion King, Mary Poppins and the Woman in White in order to see sold out shows or simply to obtain tickets. This case study for Kingston University’s electronic commerce course examines the goals and functional components of a system that the OTHER media has created for Abbey Box Office Ltd.

This case study was first developed nearly 3 years ago and is updated annually to reflect the development of the business

Goals of the case study

1. Identify the software and hardware components that make up the complete system including those run by partners
2. Outline the business goals for the project within the broader business of the company and the competitive London theatre ticketing market
3. Consider what lessons can be taken from this case study and reused for other electronic commerce projects

Understanding the business of selling tickets

It is vital whenever you are working with a client to understand how their existing business operates. This means analysing their business practices, their competitors and their partners.

1. Theatres (usually owned by a large theatre management group) selling group tickets directly, via the phone and over the web at full price. Tickets are usually sold at reduced prices for previews of new shows and on the day to concessionary customers such as students.
2. Ticket agencies (such as Keith Prowse, Encore and Abbey Box Office) buy and sell tickets from the theatre groups via negotiated discounted allocations or at face value. They usually add a handling or booking fee that is clearly stated at the time of booking. Unsold allocations are returned to the theatres or may be made available to other agencies.
3. TKTS half-price ticket office in Leicester Square sells remaindered tickets on behalf of the theatres for that day’s shows at half marked price.
4. Ticket touts (unauthorised agents) buy tickets at face value and resell adding often high ticket fees.
5. Travel agents and hotels may work with either agencies or touts to find tickets for their customers.

Designing a web presence for Abbey Box Office

The OTHER media was contacted in early 2004 to design a new ecommerce site for Abbey Box Office Ltd. They had an existing website but it was poorly designed, hard to find via the search engines, hard to maintain and poorly integrated into their offline ticket selling processes.

Key goals identified for the new site

These were the goals identified in the OTHER media’s original proposal (Feb 2004) to Abbey Box Office

• A professional confident design
• A hardworking ‘home page’
• Well designed navigation to support different ways of browsing
• Building traffic through improved ‘product ‘and keyword visibility
• Powerful content and site management:
• Integrated reporting tools to allow monitoring of visitors and sales
• Integration with Thebs ticket booking engine
• Recognition of repeat customers and individual accounts:
• Foundations for affiliate/trade customer schemes and discounts
• Foundations for incentives, promotions and email marketing
• Hosting and support for the ecommerce site on an ongoing basis

An aside

The OTHER media makes its money from selling graphical design services, technical software development (including the reuse of software modules already developed for other clients), hosting, training and technical support services as well as joint ventures with clients paid on a revenue sharing basis.

Technical issues

Before a project starts we analyse both the existing systems and what competitors are doing in the marketplace. There are usually several partners involved in the whole system and we need to work out carefully who has responsibility for tasks such as product availability information, credit card processing, returns handling and fulfilment.

1. Tickets available for offer are stored in a system called Thebs developed for a number of agencies and used as the backend for the existing offline telephone and walk-in sales
2. Allocations negotiated from theatres are entered into the Thebs system by Abbey staff
3. Credit card processing is handled by the Thebs system
4. Abbey Box Office’s version of the Thebs system is hosted and run at their head office in Victoria and accessed over a private network by their other walk-in ticket kiosks in Covent Garden and Marble Arch
5. Web orders must be integrated with all other orders to ensure that tickets are only sold once.

Components of the Abbey Box Office ecommerce site

This is a relatively simple architecture because only two partners are involved (us and Thebs). All the customer facing and content management systems are hosted at our data centre while the Thebs system is sited at Abbey’s offices in Victoria)

• Web front end (hosted on Web server at Park Royal)
  • Design graphics
  • Style sheets to layout pages and provide printable and accessible versions
  • Page templates (views), optimised for search engines
  • Browsing and searching functionality
  • Promotional functionality
• Shopping cart system (hosted on web server and communicating with Thebs and database server over VPN)
  • Current order and order history
  • Basket
  • Customer accounts
  • Billing address and payment details
• Show and venue database (hosted on database server at Park Royal)
  • Details of current and forthcoming shows and venues
  • Graphics and promotions for shows and venues
  • Allocations (extracted from Thebs)
• Thebs web service
  • Thebs ordering functionality exposed to ecommerce site via a “web service” allowing structured XML communication between web site and Thebs
  • Web service hosted on a separate web server (at Abbey Box Office)
• Thebs
• Content and store management systems (hosted on web server cluster at Park Royal)
  • Allows adding and editing of show data and graphics
  • Allows management and tracking of promotions

Business logic

It is vital that we understand how the ordering process will be structured and every message that needs to be passed between systems.

1. Customer browsers or searches for a specific show
2. Customer requests availability of tickets
3. Web site requests 30 day availability from Thebs for particular number of seats
4. Thebs returns data and it is displayed in calendar format
5. Customer requests specific date
6. Site requests tickets from Thebs
7. Thebs returns tickets (blocking off allocation) while payment is confirmed
8. Customer enters billing and payment information (repeat customers do not have to enter all their details again)
9. Thebs accepts order
10. Tickets issued as if from offline transaction
11. Thebs releases tickets after 15 mins if sale not completed

Issues in creating a robust usable solution for Abbey Box Office and their customers

These issues are likely to be similar for each of the projects we do but the solutions will differ depending on the client, the technologies deployed and legacy systems that have to be integrated.

1. Integration with existing legacy system in a seamless manner
2. Ensuring compliance with disabilities discrimination act
3. Achieving tighter integration than competitors. Most Thebs clients access Thebs directly rather than via the XML service – this provides a less smooth customer purchasing process.
4. Creating store management tools and processes that are easy to learn and use
5. Designing the site to make it easy to promote to search engines
6. Designing the site to allow future extensions and improvements

Update October 2005

1. The Abbey Box Office site is going well but not as well as hoped
2. Traffic to the site is too low
3. Conversion rates are above average so increasing traffic should increase revenues
4. Abbey needs to commit greater editorial and search engine resources
5. Abbey needs to explore online advertising although this is a highly competitive market

Update October 2006

1. Increased search engine and PPC advertising has transformed the site
2. Revenue now running at 10x month on month
3. Improvements now being made on increasing visitor conversion
4. Added tools to help increase intelligence about what customers want
5. Considering adding additional products

Questions

1. How well do you think the OTHER media achieved the goals it set out at the start of the project?
2. The site took 3-4 person months to design and develop. What scale of work do you think was involved in each of the following tasks?
   Analysis, Graphical design, Database design for shows, online customer accounts and orders, Integration with Thebs, Providing content management systems for the site, Marketing and support of the site
3. How would you improve the site now that it has been launched? What additional sources of revenue are possible?

Copyright and contacts

This case study is copyright Jonathan Briggs, Kingston University 2004-2006 but may be used with permission. Jonathan can be contacted by email at jonathan.briggs@othermedia.com or via www.jonathanbriggs.com.

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