Ari Salomon | StubHub Review and Buy

Review your order, buy your tickets

Tickets made easy for buyers

The problem: Like any ecommerce application, StubHub allows users to review their purchases before they checkout. This step of the process is important because it lets users make sure they are not incorrectly purchasing something. Although it does increase the likelihood, that the user will not buy the order, it does assist the user from making unwanted purchases. Additionally it builds trust and reduces contact with our customer support centers.

The overall process of purchasing a ticket is StubHub’s most heavily valued function. It is the part of the process where all of our money is made. StubHub makes it money by charging both sellers and buyers a premium for buying a ticket. Once a ticket is bought on StubHub, the seller and the buyer complete their transaction and StubHub walks away with a hefty percentage of that sale.

The review and buy component of our website needed assistance from additional designers and I volunteered my design time to help with various components within the checkout process. My efforts went to explaining to fee structure to our users as well as assisting them if their tickets they were interested in were purchased while they were checking out.

The Goal

The goal was to first create a pricing breakdown that could be altered, tested, and iterated upon to explain how the fee structure works. The way this information was displayed changed the user’s purchasing habits.

Additionally I was also tasked with explaining to the user that their ticket could have been taken while they were checking out. Although this was unlikely, it often resulted in the user not completing another purchase.

The Process

I created prototypes for both projects, the tooltip breakdown as well as informing user their tickets were purchased. My goal was to see first if the users understood each message. Additionally my goal was to make sure that the users still felt comfortable with StubHub and that they trusted us.

Unfortunately both seeing an inflated price and seeing that your tickets were purchased before they checkout broke trust and frustrated users.

The Solution

To solve for these two issues, we conducted multiple AB tests to understand which pricing breakdown had a better impact on conversion. This means we tried various combinations of how the price and price breakdown was displayed to see what impacted user behavior. This project is actually never completely finished as we constantly tried to show new ways of how the price was broken down to give a better understanding of why we charged a fee.

The solution helped when we explained that the fee was used to protect their purchase and to insure that the tickets are authentic. We made sure that ever seller had real tickets. This showed that if the tickets had issues, we could easily change them to make sure the buyer got real tickets.

The other project was to demonstrate that the tickets have been purchased while the user was checking out. This was problematic because the user would have to start the search process again causing drop off, disrupted trust, and calls to our customer service centers. We found that an animated feature with playful text worked best to show users that this occurred. The problem was is that jokes do not translate well across other countries. We finally had to use a more direct message letting the user know they had to purchase different tickets if they wanted to go to this event.

The Results

Both the tooltip as well as the message demonstrating that the tickets were purchased had beneficial results. The tooltip has been tested repeatedly to find the one that best pushes customers through the process.

The animation showing the tickets were purchased is currently implemented and has been proven to be beneficial. Users still do drop off but do so less than before.