Ari Salomon | StubHub Delivery & Fulfillment

Delivery and fulfillment

So many types of tickets, so many countries

The problem: StubHub had expanded across 48 countries and our ticket selling platform was expanding rapidly. We needed a simple and effective way to understand what type of ticket a seller possessed. All ticket sellers must inform us what type of tickets they had for an event. With over a dozen different types of tickets, this became a challenge. Tickets could be in the form of PDFs, physical paper tickets, wristbands, season pass cards, barcodes, and digital mobile tickets. On top of that we began accepting many new ticket types.

StubHub call centers were getting a lot of calls about how to deliver non typical tickets. Additionally, because we had expanded internationally, foreign customers with non typical tickets would increased traffic into our customer support centers. The most common place a seller to exit our process was when we asked their ticket type. We needed a new solution!

The Goal

We wanted to increase the rate that sellers completed a listings. Additionally we wanted to decrease our customer service contact rate for this particular topic. Any significant decreases in either of these areas would increase profits by reducing overhead.

The Process

The process started with a complete list of ticket mediums and very long descriptions for each ticket medium. I then conducted a thorough brainstorming session with a team of designers to come up with the best visual communication tactic. We decided upon an icon set that would help describe each ticket type.

Furthermore, language was extremely important. I worked with our content strategy team to come up with short explanations for each ticket type. The explanations could be no longer than one sentence and had to be easily translatable to other languages.

Once this was established, each ticket type was put into mockups and user testing was completed to make sure users understood various ticket methods. We structured our usability with new users, people who have never sold a ticket on StubHub. Two rounds of iterations were necessary to create well constructed icon sets and descriptions. By the end of the process, a fully functional prototype has been created by myself to communicate to product managers, developers, and stakeholders of the ticket delivery process.

The last portion of the process came through a congratulatory message explaining that the tickets had been listed. We informed the user of the next steps once their ticket sold.

The Solution

I worked with our developers to incorporate the delivery types into our ticket selling process. We worked to make sure this process could work on any desktop, tablet or phone.

Part of this was educating the users on how to fulfill tickets. For example, PDF tickets required directions on how to upload.

Each ticket type and ticket descriptions was translated and the designs were released on internationally to all 48 countries we operated in.

The Result

We increased the conversion rate and significantly decreased the number of customer service calls to our customer service center. This process has been fully released to all 48 countries in which StubHub operates and has been translated into nearly a dozen different languages.