At PAYMENTSfn, the conference for payments engineers, Nicole Grazioso and Vaibhav Kaul from SeatGeek presented on scaling payments while growing your business.
SeatGeek is a ticket search engine that makes finding tickets to live entertainment a cinch. Since its founding, SeatGeek's business model has continually advanced. But along the way it was always vital that they were able to accept payments and provide a great customer experience.
Accepting the very first order is always more difficult than the millionth, according to Nicole and V. So, the SeatGeek team went through the planning and creation of their payment process in a very deliberate way. Both to ensure scalability and flexibility. That deliberate approach to their business model's evolution was on display in this session.
Building a Great Payments Experience
Nicole and V. discussed how the SeatGeek team looked at their initial model of searching for tickets and scraping ticket data.
The team realized that ticket buyers would have a variable experience, especially on mobile. when they go to checkout. The team decided to build a checkout experience in SeatGeek, but the question of how to send payments to partners was a challenge. Standardization across partners simply wasn't there to leverage.
They decided to use Spreedly to pass payments to their partners. Using Spreedly meant there was no need to enforce the same standardized approach to payments across all partners. And at the same time there was significant business flexibility for the SeatGeek team.
Accepting Payments as the Merchant of Record
The business model then advanced so SeatGeek became the merchant of record. The company had incredible experience at delivering a great purchase for the buyer. And becoming the merchant of record helped them deliver an even better buying experience. It also opened the door for dynamic pricing and more flexibility around payment methods. Using the Spreedly vault and payment APIs they were able to simply pass payments through -- the integrations just worked.
SeatGeek then took another step, this time into Enterprise solutions for large venues and entertainment companies. Again, there was a vital need to be able to flexibly accept payments. Through Spreedly, there were no worries about whether a partner gateway had a good API, the integration handled it.
Nicole and V. capped off their session with a brief look at futures, and the opportunity in payments that lies ahead for SeatGeek and its customers. It was an exciting session that prompted a lot of discussion in the hallway among other payments engineers and experts.
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