Distributed commerce facilitates discovery, purchase, and sales of products and services through distributor partners. With E-Commerce, the practice has become more and more widespread and it is the way Eventbrite operates: by displaying events in the right places for the right people.
Eventbrite was launched in 2006 with the idea of democratizing a market that, according to its founders, Julia and Kevin Hartz, delivered high prices and a bad experience to consumers. It is a platform for event organization that focuses on buying and selling tickets. With offices in 10 countries and over 400 million tickets processed, it is favored by many organizers from small lectures to major music festivals.
With Eventbrite, you can create events, share them on social media, sell and buy tickets on both the website and the mobile app, track your sales, and receive payments online.
The company’s simpler package charges the event organizers a fee of 6.99% for each paid ticket. It also charges a buyers fee — a convenience fee calculated based on event types, ticket amounts, and contracted plans -, but the organizer can take payment by changing the account’s settings. Lastly, for free events, there are no fees are charged to the organizer by Eventbrite.
Main features for ticketing
-> Mobile: Available for iOS and Android, the Eventbrite application allows the event organizer to track data in real-time, namely the number of buyers and their check-ins.
-> Budget management: To help the organizer to manage their budget, Eventbrite provides a spreadsheet for controlling costs and revenues related to the tickets sales.
-> Partnerships: Eventbrite has developed partnerships to facilitate transactions for their users. Some of them are on Facebook and Instagram where it is possible to directly purchase tickets. The benefit of partnering with Facebook is that twice as many tickets end up being sold on the platform and 500,000 more events end up published on Facebook. And with Instagram, through the new “buy tickets” button, Eventbrite now has access to leads from the network’s 200 million daily users. The partnership with Spotify allows the promotion of concerts and festivals to more than 100 million users — with the ability to give suggestions of events according to preferences and notifications of tour dates.
Pros and Cons
Pros
• Whether it is for the event organizer or the ticket buyer, Eventbrite offers a self-service application. Thus, the user does not need to contact anyone to finish the purchase, while the organizer has full control of their event.
• It has a great diversity of events from conferences to concerts.
• It has a low cost — 6.99% fee for each ticket, which can be paid by credit card or PayPal. It is also free for events that do not charge entry.
Cons
• The search engine requires some improvements with regards to events surveyed by location. For example, when you search for events in a city, the results often cover the entire metropolitan area without giving specific details.
• The main disadvantage pointed out by users is Eventbrite’s technical support.