Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Online Marketing Consultant

Well, Lollapalooza tickets went on sale today for $60/piece. There were only 3000 tickets to be sold and it appears that I was not one of the lucky few to get them in this round. Ah well, there is always the next round of tickets on April 3rd. A number of people appear to be in the same boat. No big deal.

However, during this purchase process, I began to rethink the “waiting room” metaphor used by many online ticket purchasing venues, in this case, Front Gate Tickets. The below case study also applies to Ticketmaster as their waiting room/queue is very similar.

If we take a look at the ticket buying processes of in person buying versus the online buying experience, we can see some obvious things missing from the online experience, which leads to much of the negative buying experiences people have with online ticket purchasing.

In Person:
People wait in a physical line for a ticket window. They can easily see how many people are in line with them, both before tickets go on sale and how many are ahead of them in the ticket queue. This process makes supply and demand more transparent to the purchaser. They know that the venue where this performance takes place is approximately C seats in capacity. The line they are standing in has L people ahead of them and there are T number of ticket windows across the country. So a simple equation becomes L x T has to be less than C in order to obtain a ticket. We are assuming that all ticket windows sell tickets at the same rate so that no ticket window has any advantage. So the user can make a general assessment based on these variables and can then decide a) let’s stay in line and take my chances or b) there are too many people here, I’m going home. It gives them the freedom to choose based on given information.

Online:
The purchaser arrives at website X where they have the same information in terms of capacity of seats C. If this is a high traffic website, they are greeted with a “waiting room” or “waiting screen”. See screenshot below taken from Front Gate Tickets Lollapalooza ticket sale.

At this point, the user doesn’t need the information provided above as to “high server volume”. This is the responsibility of the website administrator to handle, not the users. They cannot do anything about the volume of traffic on the website, and it’s a bit off putting almost to say “It’s your fault.” The next few lines tell the user they are in a waiting room, however, it does not indicate a place in line or how long they will be in the waiting room. This waiting page needs to inform the user, this is your location in line (much as waiting in line in person does) as well as how long they will be in the waiting queue. The other technical information related to “DO NOT REFRESH YOUR BROWSER” is something that, again, the website administrator should handle in order to ensure that it doesn’t matter what user action occurs that the person will still remain in line, short of leaving the website. They also need to make sure whatever technology they put in place indeed works, unlike the examples listed here. If I am waiting in line at a physical ticket window, I can have my friend take my place while the line advances and I can also ask the person behind me or in front of me to honor my position in line while I leave for a short moment. You do not have these social graces when shopping online. I am not suggesting that online interfaces need to honor social interactions available in the physical world, I am merely expressing the dichotomy of online and in person purchasing experiences.

Conclusion:
The conclusion of this is that the online interface needs to provide more information to the user than is otherwise available in order to reassure them that they are part of the purchase process. By providing a time for exactly how long they will be in line, they can decide whether they want to commit the time necessary to complete the purchase process instead of a vague open ended time frame. Also, by providing a number of people ahead of the user in the queue, they can also make an estimate of whether or not it is reasonable to wait. For example: if I am waiting for tickets for a concert and there are 10 tickets left, but my wait time is 4 hours, I am probably not going to get the tickets, but if I have this information I can make an informed decision for myself instead of the “wait and see” scenario now available. By adding small bits of information they can make the online ticket purchasing process much easier and less stressful than it currently is.