7 Changes Reshaping the Online Ticket-Buying Experience
By Dave Boehme, CEO, VBO Tickets
For a long time, the online ticket shop had one main job:
Help someone find a ticket and complete the purchase.
That sounds simple, but the way people buy has changed a lot.
Today, someone might discover an event on Instagram, click through from Google, look at dates on their phone, text the link to a friend, come back later, and finally buy without ever visiting the organization’s main website.
That changes what the ticket shop needs to be.
It’s not just checkout anymore.
It’s becoming part of the marketing experience, part of the brand, part of discovery, and in many cases the first real digital interaction a patron has with an organization.
We’ve been thinking about this a lot while rebuilding VBO’s Ticket Shop.
Here are seven changes I think matter.
1. Mobile-first has to mean more than “works on a phone”
A lot of software is still designed for desktop first and then adapted for mobile.
That’s not really mobile-first.
People use phones differently. They move quickly. They expect obvious navigation. They don’t want to hunt around, zoom in, or work through a process that was clearly designed for a 27-inch monitor.
The standard can’t just be:
“Can someone buy a ticket from their phone?”
The better question is:
“Was this experience actually designed around the phone?”
That affects almost everything — layout, navigation, speed, how dates are presented, how ticket options appear, and how much information gets put in front of someone at once.
2. Discovery is becoming part of ticketing
The old assumption was that marketing helped someone decide what to attend, and ticketing handled the purchase.
That line is getting blurry.
When someone reaches a ticket shop, they may still be figuring things out.
Which event?
Which date?
Which performance?
Which ticket type?
What else is happening?
The ticketing experience has to help with those questions now.
That means calendars, filters, event categories, imagery, descriptions, and navigation matter a lot more than they used to.
The ticket shop is moving earlier in the customer journey.
3. Every event page is becoming a landing page
This is a big one.
An event page used to be something people reached after moving through an organization’s website.
Now it may be the first page they see.
They can arrive from:
Google.
Email.
Social media.
An ad.
A QR code.
A link sent by a friend.
That means the event page has to stand on its own.
It needs context.
It needs to look right.
It needs to be easy to share.
It needs a clean URL.
It needs to work well with analytics and tracking.
At that point, it’s doing the job of both a ticketing page and a marketing landing page.
I think that distinction is going to matter less and less.
4. The handoff between the organization and the ticketing system should disappear
This is something the ticketing industry has lived with for a long time.
Someone is on a beautifully designed theater, museum, festival, or venue website.
They click “Buy Tickets.”
And suddenly everything changes.
Different design.
Different navigation.
Different branding.
Sometimes it even feels like they’ve gone to a completely different company.
Technically, the system may work fine.
But the customer experience breaks.
Consumers are much less tolerant of that than they used to be.
The ticketing experience should feel like part of the organization — not like a separate system bolted onto it.
The best technology should almost disappear.
5. Ticketing is getting more complicated behind the scenes, but it needs to feel simpler to the patron
Ticketing software can get very complicated.
Assigned seating.
General admission.
Timed admission.
Subscriptions.
Memberships.
Holds.
Group sales.
Promotions.
Pricing rules.
Exchanges.
Donations.
Different access rules.
The organization may need all of that.
The patron doesn’t need to understand all of it.
I think this is one of the harder product challenges in ticketing.
You want more capability for the organization without making the buying process feel more complicated.
In other words:
More sophistication behind the scenes. Less friction in front of the patron.
That sounds easy.
It isn’t.
6. Organizations want more control over the storefront
For years, the ticket shop was often one of the more fixed parts of the ticketing system.
You got what the platform gave you.
That is changing.
Organizations increasingly want control over:
How events are presented.
How patrons navigate.
How the storefront looks.
How departments manage content.
How campaigns link into the experience.
How the ticket shop connects to the rest of the website and digital ecosystem.
That makes the storefront much more than a transactional utility.
It becomes something the organization actively manages as part of the customer experience.
7. The best ticketing technology may become less noticeable
I think this is where all of these changes lead.
Organizations want more capability.
More control.
More data.
More flexibility.
Patrons want the opposite.
They want less complexity.
They want things to be obvious.
Fast.
Easy.
That’s the interesting challenge.
The ticketing platform may become much more sophisticated while the patron sees less of that sophistication.
That’s probably a good thing.
What this meant for VBO
When we started working on the new VBO Ticket Shop, we realized fairly quickly that this couldn’t just be a visual refresh.
The bigger question was:
What should a modern ticket-buying experience actually feel like?
That pushed us to rethink the storefront around mobile behavior, cleaner navigation, stronger branding, more flexible event discovery, cleaner URLs, and more control for the organization.
It also pushed us away from thinking about Ticket Shop as simply the place where a transaction happens.
We started thinking about it as a customer-facing product in its own right.
That may be the biggest change.
For a long time, ticketing companies focused heavily on what happened after someone decided to buy.
Now I think we have to pay just as much attention to everything leading up to that moment.
How someone finds the event.
How they understand it.
How they move through the experience.
How the organization’s brand carries through.
And how easy it feels to actually complete the purchase.
The question is changing from:
“Can the system process the ticket?”
to:
“How good can the entire buying experience be?”
That’s what shaped the new VBO Ticket Shop.
And I think it’s where the industry is headed.
