MUMBAI: Gone are the days when one had to wait for their turn at the ticketing window. E ticketing in India is making its way for the convenience of the audiences. Radioandmusic.com attempts to comprehend the working of E ticketing. Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer, KyaZoonga, Arpita Majumder, talks about the growth and size of the industry.

Excerpts:

What is the growth of E ticketing in India and what are the growth sectors? What is the size of the market/ industry?

It is estimated that the ticketing industry including movies, sports and concerts amongst others is worth $3-4 billion and is growing at 60-70 per cent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). Live music accounts for only 10-15 per cent of the ticketing pie (Report by IBEF – The Rise and Rise of E-commerce in India, January 2013). Growth of ticketing in live music events is happening because the quality of content has improved - better artists and better production. There is a change in mind set among people who don’t hesitate to pay for a quality concert offered through a hassle-free and efficient ticketing system. This is a paradigm shift in Indian markets as organizers who had to bank heavily on sponsorships to make an event viable are now increasingly looking to cover their costs through ticket sales.

Ticketing is not a simple exercise - more so in India because ticketing as a concept in India didn’t exist earlier and is still in its nascent stage. We have been able to leverage our scalable and flexible back-end technology platform to add incremental features to our product suite as the ticketing market has evolved in India. What’s being rolled out now is what the company had envisioned a few years ago. Starting from online, to on-ground, to retail, our robust backend system makes sure everything is running smoothly from a central system.

With an increasing fan base, international music icons are now looking at India as a platform to have concerts and to promote their tours and latest albums as well. This in return has increased the potential of the entertainment industry in the country which has seen a significant rise in the ticket and music sales

What is KyaZoonga’s ticketing system and platform work in relation to entertainment viz. Music and sports? Where the technology is sourced from- Overseas or was it designed in India? Is the infrastructure in place to support your state-of-art system? How Smartphone friendly is the system?

We are credited with pioneering the concept of centralised ticketing system in India. We have created the entertainment and sports ticketing market in the Indian subcontinent, where all sales channels (internet, box office, retail, phone and mobile) are driven from one central ticketing system. This centralized system ensures that any available ticket can be purchased by the customer from any sales channel that has been activated by the organiser ensuring fair access for the customer. Our company is undisputedly the only ticketing company in the sub-continent that owns its entire intellectual property having built the entire system in-house.

We offer our customers the latest features while purchasing tickets for movies or events or any merchandise. Our quintessential feature is that we are only ticketing portal to offer ‘Shopping Cart’ option to pick and drop items across various categories. The Shopping Cart functionality ensures that the customer can make multiple purchases across different platforms (tickets across various verticals and events, merchandise etc.) and make a consolidated payment for the complete purchase at the end. We witnessed a surge in live music performance in 2012 and there is a lot of potential to scale up to in the future as the live entertainment space is getting bigger and broader in reach. Superior technology is the essence of a successful E-commerce business facilitating seamless interaction for companies selling their products or services with customers through a web or mobile device based interface. Our company has always used technology as a pillar to engage with the customers and popularise sports and events in India. Our strategy is to continue to invest in technology and to incorporate practices like just-in-time delivery, where we can deliver the product purchased online to customers directly from the source or supplier. We have all the latest software, tools and applications to help us successfully meet all the challenges of providing world class ticketing service to our clients. Our infrastructure includes latest high-end servers with appropriate power backup and fault tolerant configurations to ensure a 100 per cent up time. The robustness of and scalability our technology ensures that we handle data at all levels with the ability to automatically analyze, adapt and assess as required

As the number of mobile subscribers is increasing at an exponential rate and convenience in purchasing tickets for their favorite live or sporting event being the priority we have a user friendly mobile application. The uniqueness of this application is it gives the option of ‘Adding to Cart’ apart from providing multiple payment options like credit and debit cards and net banking, as well as cash on delivery (subject to availability on the event).

How safe/foolproof and user-friendly is the system for users? How has KyaZoonga disseminated information among end-users and agents?

Strict policies by RBI have minimised fraudulent online payments to a great extent, which in return offer our users a safe and user friendly experience. Apart from incorporating features like two level authentications in payments, we also have a powerful risk management system that weeds out risky transactions and customers. We also work closely with organisers to incorporate high tech security features in our tickets making it tough to duplicate. Our validation technology has also evolved with the latest advances and we constantly update our validation processes to eliminate fraud.

With regards to payment modes, we have noticed that the customers are not hesitant at using their cards as long as we maintain their trust and give them an assurance of a safe transaction. Our systems offer the latest encryptions for SSL and to ensure customers are aware of the security features, we highlight them on our payment pages. Having been part of the inception of the growth of e-commerce in India, we have also been an active part of educating customers over the years on the efficacy and reliability of online transactions on well-known websites, and today, we can safely say that most customers are well aware of the payments and are comfortable. For those who may still be somewhat apprehensive regardless of how much information is disseminated, we offer the flexibility of cash payment for tickets and merchandise via our online and other sales channels.

What has been the response of event management companies? Will it (your system) also work in the fast growing Tier II & III centers?

Event management companies want to give their end consumers a smooth and seamless access to their favorite concert or match games. They partner with us to bring out value and reach out to the millennial generation and we are helping these companies to propel their growth with easy access to tickets. Recently, many Tier II cities have emerged as attractive markets for events especially in cricket with new international standard cricket grounds coming up in these cities. Cricket stadiums across the metros like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata etc. have also undergone major revamps and changes. Apart from ticket sales we are seeing a steady increase in our online IPL merchandise sales especially in Tier II and III cities over the last couple of years. Our technology is adaptable to all kind of environments and works equally well in metro cities as well as Tier II and Tier III cities. A very recent example of how well our system has worked in a non-metro city is the sold out Delhi Daredevils matches in Raipur in 2013, where literally within 48 hours of going live, over 95 per cent of the stadium was sold out through our online and retail channels all powered up simultaneously (also a first, to ensure access to all customers) and through our proprietary centralized ticketing system. We also offered an exciting suite of team merchandise for Delhi Daredevils fans that included t-shirts, team jerseys, caps, autographed bats and balls and much more which saw good traction as well. This only highlights the potential of some of newer cities where good product offered through a convenient medium generates a strong positive response from the customer.

Can KyaZoonga share an event where its system was successfully put to work?

India is now emerging as a hotspot in Asia's music circuit and has seen popular music artists like Bryan Adams, Madonna etc., perform in front of packed venues across the country. We are also seeing an increase in events catering to niche audiences like International DJ tours which are organized across multiple cities. We were privileged to be associated as the official ticketing partner for the Guns N’ Roses concert in India. The ticket sales for the concert were unprecedented. The concert had a massive turn out as 50,000 tickets were sold. Given the scale, we activated 89 retail outlets across the country in addition to our online presence to sell tickets for this massive concert. Our robust technology based centralized systems ensure we can power up more than 100 retail ticketing outlets in a time span of 24 hours. We also initiated retailing merchandise so that it can provide an end-to-end solution, for instance, people who buy tickets may also be keen to purchase jersey and other memorabilia.

Anything you’d like to add.

While we are seeing strong growth in the regular ticketing business, we are excited about the strong response and growth in our Do It Yourself platform – iTicket. KyaZoonga’s iTicket platform enables anyone, including individual users to create their own events, price the tickets and then sell them. This service works particularly well with micro events which usually do not require the value added services associated with a ticketing service for a full-scale event and use only the vanilla ticketing offering as it suits their scale and budget constraints. Micro events could be anything from alumni meets, training events, employee get-togethers, small conferences, niche music events and even cocktail parties. This is a win-win solution as KyaZoonga can leverage its existing infrastructure while small organizers can get access to top class ticketing and allied services like payment gateway access and delivery of tickets for their events at an affordable price.