The emergence of online commerce has significantly changed the scope of many industries across the world, perhaps most notably the event industry. As transactions have shifted from in-person to online, purchasing tickets has become more efficient, but also more hazardous.
StubHub, a leader in the online ticketing exchange industry, is working to make their transactions faster and more secure through a variety of new methods. They hope to not only drive customer loyalty through these methods, but also convert those that still prefer dealing directly with ticketing box offices.
In May, StubHub announced a new partnership with Google Cloud Platform and Pivotal Software to help speed up operations.
Jeff Poirier, General Manager of Music and Theatre for StubHub, explained his company’s bold new move: “What that’s going to provide StubHub with is the ability to, at-scale, move more quickly,” Poirier said. “Whether that’s deploying new products, feature changes, deploying payments or adding a new method of payment, all these things are going to be able to happen faster with us moving to the cloud.”
However, Poirier stressed that this increase of speed for transactions will have no effect on security for buyers and sellers.
StubHub offers multiple guarantees to protect both buyers and sellers. For buyers, they guarantee that all tickets posted on the site are legitimate and will be delivered by the date of the event. For sellers, they guarantee payment for all tickets sold on the site, even if StubHub encounters problems with a buyer’s payment.
“When your ticket sells, we guarantee you’re going to get the payment and the buyer is going to get [his] ticket,” Poirier said. “We’re a full intermediary, so we try to educate [consumers] and tell [them] that they don’t need to know who they’re selling to or who they’re buying from to trust that the transaction will go smoothly… We stand in the middle and fully guarantee the entire thing.”
In addition to this, StubHub is also exploring new technologies including blockchain to further protect buyers and sellers.
All of this, he explained, is in pursuit of the company goal to help customers safely and efficiently conduct business online.