Braintree and Eventbrite: Revolutionizing Events Through Payments

At Braintree and Eventbrite, we share the same passion for offering seamless and stellar commerce experiences for users around the world. While Eventbrite creates their own intuitive and simple UI, Braintree powers the payments to help optimize it. We each oversee two distinct yet equally important pieces of the puzzle, and by partnering with Braintree, Eventbrite is able to offer its customers and their attendees unique and innovative experiences.

A new way to sell

What Braintree refers to as contextual commerce, Eventbrite dubs distributed commerce, and both partners vehemently believe it’s the purchasing behavior of the future. Contextual or distributed commerce enables users to seamlessly purchase products and services when they first discover them, in the context of the places where they already are spending time online.

In the ticketing space, Eventbrite has partnered with platforms like Facebook and Bandsintown to empower people to purchase tickets to Eventbrite events directly within those sites and apps. This means that users are no longer forced down a redirected, convoluted path to another site to buy tickets, often leading to shopping cart abandonment. These native purchase experiences benefit experience-seekers, places of discovery like Facebook and Bandsintown, event-enablement platforms like Eventbrite, and, ultimately, event organizers who are looking to reach the right people with the right event at the right time, in order to sell more tickets.

Stronger together

Behind these creative experiences are partnerships which require tightly integrated communication in order to make the experience frictionless and awesome for customers. One critical piece of that equation is the secure sharing of tokenized payment information to help ensure that every transaction happens smoothly.

Enter Braintree.

Braintree works with platforms like Facebook and Bandsintown to securely receive users’ payment information during checkout and then store it in the Braintree Vault. Using our commerce infrastructure tools, those platforms extend the power of their vaults by granting special tokens (non-sensitive identifiers that tie back to users’ payment information) to Eventbrite so that they can run the transaction behind the scenes, even though the ticket purchaser’s checkout experience occurs entirely on Facebook or Bandsintown.

This is an important nuance; even though Eventbrite wants to sell tickets wherever its users are discovering events, owning the transaction provides the ability to manage all of the post-purchase activity (providing stellar customer service, easy handling of returns/refunds, etc). The result has been tremendous: events where the full transaction takes place directly on Facebook moves 2x the number of tickets than if the ticket-buyer is redirected to complete the purchase.1 Organizers are seeing more value from the expanded reach of new discovery channels, with more than half a million Eventbrite events being published to Facebook since the distributed commerce integration went live. In fact, since launch, Eventbrite has sold over 1 million tickets through distributed commerce channels across all of its partners—a significant number of incremental tickets sold on behalf of event organizers.2

Beyond the wallet

And, what’s more, Eventbrite is now able to innovate even further by leveraging Braintree’s platform to support seamless RFID payments at events and festivals. Event wristbands act as tickets; and now, with the help of Braintree, as event-goers’ wallets as well.

To set the stage, Eventbrite wanted to create an immersive cashless experience by allowing festival attendees to use their wristbands to pay for food, beverages, and merchandise without ever needing to pull out a credit card. With just a tap, the wristbands used the same payment information used for the ticket purchase for in-person buys. And the results were incredible: on average, attendees who used cashless spent close to 2x what non-cashless users spent per day.3 Eventbrite’s festival organizer, partnering with concessions vendors that ran on completely separate payment systems, wanted a way to share tokenized payment information with those vendors for the duration of the festival. Again, Eventbrite looked to Braintree as its payment partner and leveraged our commerce infrastructure tools to grant special tokens to these vendors, allowing them to run transactions during the festival. When the festival ended, Eventbrite could easily revoke access; the concession vendors no longer had the ability to run transactions, ensuring that users’ payment information remained solely and securely in Eventbrite’s Braintree Vault. The vast majority of attendees who used cashless said it improved their overall experience (84%) and would use it again (89%).4

What’s next for what’s next?

From ticket purchases directly on Facebook to wristbands that serve as wallets, these experiences show how commerce is evolving to adapt to changing consumer behavior and expectations. Braintree strives to be the payments operating system that adapts to market trends and grows with customers, like Eventbrite, through partnerships and innovation. We will continue to focus on producing great user experiences as a result of these partnerships and we can’t wait for what’s next!

  1. https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/boost-sales-by-selling-tickets-on-facebook-ds0d/

  2. Based on data collected by Eventbrite in 2017

  3. Based on data collected by Eventbrite in 2017

  4. Based on data collected by Eventbrite in 2017

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Azita Habibi Sr. Manager of BD, managing our Commerce business. Current obsessions: biking the Bay, almost training for triathlons, and perfecting my pan con tomate, which oddly requires a lot of vino. More posts by this author

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