Challenge

Since launching in 2010, Ticket Tailor has believed that businesses play an important role in making the world better. A certified B Corp and carbon neutral business, Ticket Tailor donates 1.3c (1p) for every ticket sold to climate charities.

“Our vision is all about ‘growth on purpose,’” says Jonny White, Ticket Tailor founder and CEO. “Our goal is to positively impact people and the planet through our growth. And so the more tickets we sell, the more impact we have – whether that’s on our users, team, planet, or community.”

Scaling the business and expanding further into new markets, particularly the US, are the company’s top priorities this year. In 2022, the platform sold 10 million tickets and was used by more than 13,000 box offices. White notes that while it’s an exciting time for the business, this kind of hypergrowth can be challenging, particularly when it comes to payments, which he considers the most complex aspect of ticketing.

Solution

With 80,000 event organisers in 184 countries, Ticket Tailor chose Stripe to give its diverse customers the ability to offer a seamless and localised payment experience. Similarly, with many cost-conscious customers such as charities, it was able to keep payment processing fees low.

With an intentionally small team, Ticket Tailor needed a payments partner that was easy to integrate and maintain, didn’t require a heavy engineering lift, and could scale with the business. The company also needed a reliable partner with a 99.999% uptime like Stripe.

“The reliability of Stripe is very good, and that's obviously really critical for us,” says White. “We have transactions going through every second, and if something breaks, it lets our customers down and means our customer support team gets hassled.”

Onboarding new users in minutes – with minimal engineering effort

Ticket Tailor discovered that the highest drop-off point in its customer journey was during onboarding for payments.

It started using Connect to integrate payments into its platform and simplify the onboarding process. With Stripe-hosted onboarding, Ticket Tailor users can get up and running in minutes, without the upfront costs or development time usually required for payment facilitation.

“Another key motivation for choosing Connect was how easy it was to implement compared to other payment providers, even back in 2014,” says White, who added that it only took one engineer to implement the feature.

The reduced time and effort associated with managing payments is another main benefit of using Connect. “Stripe’s Payment Element makes PCI compliance easy and helps keep customers' payment data off of our servers since payment data is stored with Stripe. This, combined with fraud detection tools, is a huge shortcut for us, and instills a lot of confidence,” says White. “I would say we save the equivalent of a full-time member of staff on compliance and fraud.”

Optimising payments and expanding globally with no code

To accelerate Ticket Tailor’s expansion into new markets without a heavy engineering lift, it used Stripe’s Optimised Checkout Suite, which includes the Payment Element, multiple payment methods that are dynamically surfaced to help increase conversion, and Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout experience. Link saves a customer’s payment information the first time they check out and then autofills those card details and shipping addresses for all future purchases on Link-supported sites. All ticket buyers use guest checkout rather than creating an account with Ticket Tailor, so repeat purchases can be complicated and time-consuming.

With Link enabled, customers can save their payment details. The next time they check out, their payment details are automatically filled in, making it faster to pay. A Stripe analysis found that Link had a statistically significant increase in checkout conversion and was used to check out for 12% of all Ticket Tailor purchases, with 8% of purchases involving a returning Link consumer.

“The integration with Link was so easy, and we were even able to turn it on automatically for all of our users,” says White. “It’s going to make life easier for your customers, so why wouldn’t you adopt Link?”

With support for 40 payment methods without any additional integration effort, Ticket Tailor was able to easily turn on local payment methods, including iDEAL, giropay, EPS, and Bancontact, as well as popular wallet payment methods Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Google Pay.

“Being able to just switch on local payments has helped us with global expansion,” says White. “Stripe does all the hard work in the background. Local payment methods are no longer blocking us from investing more in certain regions.”

Unifying payments across all channels and reaching more customers

In 2022, Ticket Tailor was used for in-person sales by more than 13,000 box offices, which represent some of the platform’s biggest and most valuable customers.

“We’re doing a big push in the agritourism space and being able to sell in-person is essential for these customers,” says White. “Not every platform has an integrated payment stack with online and offline sales, so it’s a powerful value proposition for us to be able to offer it.”

With a single integration, Terminal makes it possible for Ticket Tailor customers to unify their payments stack and manage all online and offline sales in one place, simplifying reporting and reconciliation and creating a better user experience. Terminal also works seamlessly with Stripe Payments, Connect, and Billing.

Since launching Terminal, Ticket Tailor has seen 9,078 in-person ticket sales from 18 customers, totalling over $160,000 of volume.

Results

When Ticket Tailor recently expanded into Belgium and the Netherlands, it was able to simply turn on two local popular payment methods – iDEAL and Bancontact – with no code.

“Since launching the local payment methods in those markets, we’ve doubled the number of sign-ups in twelve months,” says White. “Also, the fact it's embedded means that the customer journey is nice and smooth. We're able to customise the Payment Element to each unique event organiser's page.”

The platform is already on pace to hit its goal of selling 15 million tickets and anticipates growing by another 50 percent in 2023. In 2022, it processed $264M in Connect volume. And in October, it sold one million tickets in just one month.

“Payments are so complicated, and you're likely to be busy with so many other things,” says White. “Stripe makes it simple for businesses to do everything with payments.”