One thing we heard from beta testers was that some ticketing products have very limited abilities to summarize your data, or let you manipulate it on your own.

We wanted to solve this problem with a two-part strategy:

With the addition of the new “Reports” tab in Tixato, you’ll find both these things.

You can view default reports, such as “summary of all events”, or “summary of all performances”, or you can go to the Report Builder and create your own custom report. (You can also save your custom reports for later.)

Plus, for any report within Tixato, be it a sales summary or the full details of every ticket sold, you can always download that report as a raw comma-separated-value (CSV) document, for easy import into your favorite spreadsheet.

I’m pretty happy with this first version, but as always we know you’ll see things to improve that we missed. So please don’t be shy — let us know how, and we’ll improve it!

For Tixato, one of the key images my mind turns over and over is that of, as it turns out, the checkout screen. I know, not very sexy, right? But…I actually think it is. Or at least, it could be. The little bit of rage I feel slogging through pages of ugly, confusing, barely-usable 90’s era web forms when I buy a ticket is one of my personal motivating factors to make this thing.

Which brings us to the topic of credit cards payments.

Because you can’t build a beautiful online order widget without processing credit cards.

Setting up credit card processing for Tixato has been a fascinating adventure. I’d like to share what I’ve learned, and what it means for how Tixato will work. I’m going to get into some geeky stuff here, but I figure if you’re reading this blog you’re interested in the nitty and the gritty.

First, some basics

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to processing money. Here are a few basic things to keep in mind:

Merchant Accounts. This is the basic account you must establish if you want to process credit cards directly. These accounts are established with a bank that has a relationship with the credit card companies. These banks are able to process a credit card sale, and deposit the money into your bank account.

Payment gateway services. You know those card swipe machines you use at the coffee shop or the grocery store? This is basically the fancy internet version of those card swipe machines. They talk to the processing merchant account. When you set up online sales, the payment gateway lets your web application talk to the merchant account and Do Stuff With Credit Cards™.

PCI compliance. Thieves like money. To prevent thieves from getting money that isn’t theirs, the credit card companies have strict rules about dealing with credit card numbers. They’re very serious about these rules. They includes rules about who has access to the credit card numbers, how those numbers are stored, how records are preserved and destroyed, etc. This is all good stuff, but it’s also a huge pain in the butt to get right, and requires a lot of cost in terms of compliance and insurance if your company needs to take it on.

Next, some Tixato specifics

There are two ways we’d like Tixato to work.

First, if you work for a company that already has a merchant account, we want you to be able to use that account. You may have put a lot of work into getting a low rate, or you may have a good relationship with your account provider. We want you to be able to use your existing account with Tixato.

Second, if you don’t already have a merchant account, we want you to be able to use Tixato anyway. We want you to be able to set up your event, and start selling tickets within a few minutes.

Why this Starts to Get Tricky

Now, here’s where things start to get interesting. The second model I listed, where you can use Tixato without your own merchant account, is called a “payment aggregation” model. It means that we, as Tixato, are collecting money in our own account, and then sending you a check later.

Makes perfect sense, right? Except the credit card companies hate it. Absolutely hate it. And not without reason.

The problem, from the perspective of the credit card companies, is that a payment aggregator is selling something it doesn’t own. In the case of Tixato, we’re selling tickets to other people’s shows. This means we have no direct control over the quality of the thing we’re selling, i.e. the show. If a show is canceled, who refunds the money? The credit card company doesn’t have a legal relationship with the venue, they have a legal relationship with Tixato. What if we sent out the money and can’t get it back? Or what if we were unethical and spent it, because we temporarily had a bunch of it in the bank, even though it’s really yours? At the end of the day, the customers have a right to a refund, and the credit card company is scared they’ll be on the end of that hook.

And yet, this is exactly the model we most want to offer. We’re making Tixato with the little guys in mind. What to do?

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Negotiate

I’m happy to report that, after a fair amount of work, we’ve reached an agreement with the credit card companies. We’ve described a cash flow that reduces risk, and still lets us provide this aggregate model.

There are two keys to how this will work:

Tixato won’t charge the customer’s credit cards until a day or two after the show has actually taken place. When a patron orders a ticket, we can check for sufficient funds, but we won’t actually charge the card. Then, when we know the show has taken place, we can charge the cards for the patrons.

This part of the model has some nice properties. For one thing, it means refunds up until the day of the show don’t cost any credit card processing fees, because you haven’t actually run the card yet.

The next step in the cash flow is to get the money out of Tixato and into your hands as soon as possible. The idea is that the credit card companies don’t want us holding on to the money, and theoretically tempted to use it for ourselves. Not that we would, but you know, you have to plan for the worst when you’re a credit card company. And anyway, it’s your money, you should have it as soon as possible. Initially, that will at least mean that we’re sending out checks at least once a month. But what I’d really like to see is electronic direct deposits into your accounts, so we can send the money automatically and right away. We’re still exploring our options there, but that’s the goal.

Enter Braintree

Well, this financial model is all hunky-dorey, but we actually have to be able to, you know, DO it.

Luckily, there is an awesome company called Braintree. They’re a first-rate payment gateway company with some amazing technology and some incredibly good support. For one thing, the fine folks at Briantree worked with me to negotiate the above terms for our merchant account. For another, their technology lets us do everything we want to do in Tixato.

Braintree’s API lets us create integrated credit card processing widgets without ever actually seeing anyone’s credit card. (Remember PCI compliance? Briantree takes care of that.) They let us easily integrate all kinds of processing magic, storing credit card numbers in their vault, performing checks for sufficient funds, issuing refunds, etc, without ever sending anyone to some other website. We can build a payment page directly in Tixato, or even better, we can work on building widgets for you to put in your pages.

Yay! The World is Perfect!

Almost. There’s one last wrinkle.

The technology that payment gateway services use is tied closely to the technology the merchant account services use. And here’s the wrinkle: the United States uses one kind of technology. The rest of the world uses another.

Oof

You said it.

Does that mean Tixato can’t provide credit card processing for international customers?

Well, it’s complicated. Consider the following:

There are companies like PayPal which do provide a service to process purchases in many countries. But if you use the simple version of PayPal, you’re sending patrons to an ugly page offsite, we can’t provide any automated transaction help (such as performing refunds within Tixato), and the whole experience is just not up to the level we want to provide. If you use something like PayPal Payments Pro, you can do more integration, and provide checkout pages without going off-site, but, and this is a biggy, you are now responsible for PCI compliance. This is a big can of worms, and less safe for our customers. (And, of course, any version of PayPal is…dealing with PayPal. Speaking from experience, their customer support is just terrible. Not a good place to be.)

So if we want to use a great company like Braintree, that provides all the integration options we want, and amazing customer service… no, we can’t provide credit card processing for international customers.

….exceeeept, there’s still one last wrinkle.

Success Breeds New Options.

If Tixato starts processing a lot of ticket sales, suddenly everything changes. How many ticket sales? The magic number is 3 million dollars. If we reach that milestone, we’ll suddenly have access to payment processing services that can handle the entire world. We’d still be using Braintree, but we’d be connecting to new payment processors on the back end. Getting access to these high-end processors means we’d have all the technological features we need, and be able to provide them to just about anyone in the world.

So. At the moment, that’s the plan: kick as much ass as quickly as possible, and hit that magic 3 million dollar mark.

We’ve had a lot of positive response from beta testers in other parts of the world. During the beta we’ve added support for other languages and other currencies. And we’re bummed that it looks like we won’t initially be able to provide credit card processing for those folks.

But I think we can get there, and I’m excited to try.

And in the meantime, to all my friends in the United States, well, you get the luck of the draw. You’ll get everything Tixato has to offer. You lucky devils you.

Hey, our last post was in August? What the heck happened to fall?!?

Well, what happened was we got busy working with the new beta team. It’s been awesome. (And extremely instructive!) But it did mean this poor sketchbook got neglected.

I’m here to warm it back up.

First off, I’ll review some of the highlights of what we’ve done with the beta team. The easiest way to do that is to share with you what we shared with them.

For instance, you can read about the ticket collection tool and the ticket collection PDF.

You can also read about the team behind Tixato, the new Sandbox Mode, our custom currency and language support, and how you can customize the emails sent to your patrons.

Of course, if you want to be part of the beta team, let us know!

In my next post, I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned in our negotiations with the credit card payment processors. Although the initial launch of Tixato will be cash-only, we want to add credit card processing as soon as humanly possible. I’ll share everything I’ve learned about it, and how it will work in Tixato.

Onward! Updward! Ticket….ward!

Sean and I spent a goodly amount of time prototyping a native iPhone app for Tixato. We got pretty far. But the more we worked on it, the more we started to wonder: is this the right way to do this?

We don’t need access to the most advanced features of the iPhone, such as the accelerometer, or OpenGL rendering, or things like that. And the stuff we thought we did need from the iPhone — like the ability to create beautiful side-swiping animations — it turns out…we were wrong. You don’t need a native app to do that stuff. We’re living in the age of HTML 5.

After I realized this, the answer became obvious: we should just make this a gorgeous mobile web app. Then anyone with a modern mobile browser can use it, and we don’t have to wait for weeks to see if Apple approves us for the app store, and if we find a bug we can fix it instantly.

Moreover, all those API calls Jesse created for our prototype native app? We still get to use those, because we still need those for a browser-based application.

The only catch to all this is that Sean and I aren’t experts in creating a mobile app, and I don’t want to throw any more work on Jesse’s plate while he’s burning towards the first beta release of everything else.

Solution? Find an expert to lend a hand. Say hello to Jordan Dobson. (@JordanDobson)

We sent Jordan the work we’d done on the prototype app, and he’s begun wailing away on translating that to a super-slick, web-based mobile Tixato. For example, here’s the login screen he recently created out of pure CSS:

Look ma, no images!

You can see some of his previous mobile work on Dribbble:

http://dribbble.com/players/jordandobson

I’m very happy about this adjustment. I think it’s the right way to go.

It’s a place you should never venture, but if you must venture, be sure to count among your party a Qualified Attorney.

Here we’ve been, working our way through 103-degree heat waves in Baltimore, pushing hard into the final stretch, getting more and more excited about how it’s all shaping up, when we get news from the legal frontline:

“ABORT! Your plan to file a trademark on Chroma Tickets has been derailed!”

[insert sound of screeching tires here]

What you say? We searched the hell out of that name! We didn’t see anything!

Well, what we did not see, the eyes of the Qualified Attorney did. And thus we bumped into a pending trademark for a different-but-apparently-close-enough name, for a different-but-apparently-close-enough kind of product, that is not yet officially a trademark but almost certainly will be, and boy oh boy do I not want to spend our launch party wondering how long it takes before we get sued.

So!

We put on our brainstorming hats, we fired up Domai.nr, and we started the search for a new, better, awesomer name.

It took several weeks and dozens (if not hundreds) of attempts, but finally, FINALLY we have waded through the great jungle of claimed names and discovered a very special one we are now claiming for our own:

I don’t mind telling you, I’m actually pretty happy about this. Consider, for a moment, the following properties of this lovely little word:

A reminder, I suppose, that constraints simply push us to a better place.

And now, back to work. If I can manage it in this final sprint, I’ll drop you a few screenshots as we come galloping toward the finish line.

Yes, it’s starting out simple. But damn if I don’t think you’re going to like it.

The doors are about to open. You’ve sold most of your seats ahead of time, but you’ll still be selling some tickets at the door. Time to pull out that iPhone and get rolling. Here’s one way this might work:

First off, you’ll switch from sales mode to door mode. Picking a performance is exactly the same — slide through the posters and pick a time.

From here, you’ll be able to either to quickly sell tickets as people come in…

…or you can mark patrons as “arrived” when they show up with their ticket info.

If you’re in a huge hurry and you don’t feel like looking up individual tickets, you can just tap the button for the ticket type and send people on their way.

If you do want to check people in individually, though, you can tap the “Collect” button to look up tickets by name, ticket number, or order number. With a single ticket, just click the checkbox to show that they’ve arrived. If you look up an order number, you’ll have the option to mark individual tickets.

But what if your iPhone died yesterday? What if your underground bunker of a theatre is left high and dry by AT&T? Well, there’s always paper. In fact, we’ll generate PDFs for you that list all of your ticket sales for easy crossing off at the door. And we’ll make a PDF for easily tracking sales at the door. Say, something like this:

Would that process work for you, or should we make some adjustments?

Let’s say you’re in a coffee shop, talking to a friend about your show…

FRIEND: I’ve always wanted to see Our Town performed by people in squirrel suits. Do you have tickets for Friday night?

YOU: I’m pretty sure we do.

(YOU pull out your iPhone.)

YOU: Yep. Fourteen left for the 6 o’clock show, eight for 8pm. Ten bucks each.

FRIEND: Cool. I’ll take two for the eight o’clock.

(FRIEND hands YOU a twenty.)

YOU: You’re all set. You’ll get an email with your ticket and receipt and everything. See you Friday!

That’s it! And if you do have a physical box office, you can still sell tickets using the regular web interface. We also keep a running tally of cash sales by seller, and there’s a way to log deposits to the cash box. (We want to solve your accounting headaches, too.)

Is this something you would find useful? Are we missing critical steps? Where would you sell tickets if you could sell tickets anywhere? Let us know in the comments!

(And thanks to teehan+lax for the iPhone sketch elements.)

What? Yes! Of course we’re still here!

Okay, fair enough. We disappeared there for a couple of months. Apologies for the disconnection there. You deserve some updates.

Last time, on As the Chroma Turns…

You may recall we’ve been barreling along, tumbling forward on Storyboards, patron tagging, the box office point-of-sale interface, basic discounts, and so on.

Then, two months ago, Jesse, Sean, and I got on a plane (well, strictly speaking Jesse took the train) and met up in glorious Portland Oregon. Where we squeaked about one very awesome meeting with Trisha Mead of Portland Center Stage, and then we fell silent.

So what happened? What the hell is going on?

Well, we piled into that room at Ace Hotel, threw some blues on the record player, and…

…we talked.

And we started with the question: “When can we ship?”

Because, see, we’re all fervently in the “ship early and iterate” camp. Which means we’re getting to that point where we’re feeling anxious about getting something useful out into the world. We think we’ve got some cool stuff here, but it’s all just speculation until someone can actually use it and tell us if it actually, you know, helps.

So we talked about what we’ve built so far. What are the last must-have features before we can start letting people give this a shot? What is the minimum amount of stuff we’d need before Chroma is useful for somebody?

And there we are, talking through everything we’ve made so far, and everything we have left to make, when all of a sudden Jesse says:

Hey guys, this is probably really stupid…. but… do we have to process credit cards in the first version?

And I’ll admit, I kinda looked at him blankly and didn’t say anything, because my initial response was, well, DUH we have to process credit cards. That’s kind of the whole point of Chroma: to help you do online sales.

But in my defense I didn’t say that, and we sat there in silence for a second, and then in the spirit of brainstorming… we started to talk it through.

Fundamentals

Here’s the thing: the whole point of Chroma actually isn’t to help you do online sales. Online sales are going to be critical. Not only for how you sell tickets but for how we sustain Chroma as a company. But the essence of Chroma is not, fundamentally, to process an online sale. The essence of Chroma is to help you get butts in the seats.

What If

What if the first release of Chroma was so simple it didn’t even process online credit cards? Well, it might only be useful to a very small slice of people selling tickets, but that might be okay. (Start small, right?)

What if the first release of Chroma only helped you…what? It still needs to help sell tickets. But how? Well, how about cash sales?

What if Chroma starts by just helping little venues track and process cash sales?

What if only the box office folks will interact with Chroma directly? If we’re not doing credit card processing, I guess there’s no reason for a patron to visit the Chroma website, or interact with a Chroma widget, or anything like that….and that’s a lot of work we don’t have to do for the initial launch.

Okay, so… We’ve already built the infrastructure to let you establish venues, and create events, and schedule shows, and allocate blocks of tickets, and select tickets from a box office point-of-sale interface….

So what would it mean to use all this infrastructure for the basic management of cash sales?

Well, it might mean we almost have something ready to ship.

“Half, not half-assed.” — 37signals

As we sat there in our hotel room, immersed in thoughts of a simplified first launch, I made the following proposal: if we start with just cash sales, we’ve got to do them very well.

Yes, we’ll have this lovely box office in your laptop to track sales and provide reports and stats. But now the tickets are tied to that laptop, and that’s not very flexible. I want to be able to sell some tickets at the bar tonight when I’m talking up the show to my friend and her buddies. I should be able to do that easily.

At which moment all of us looked down at our iPhones.

I’ll tell ya, when you’ve done a lot of programming on OS X, this native iPhone app stuff is a breeze.

Are we crazy?

Okay, so here’s the deal. We think we’re going to take a shot at rolling out this first cash-only version of Chroma soon. There’s still some stuff to do. We’re still working on the graphic design elements with our designer Eric Kass. There are still some missing details, like calculating taxes, figuring out what sales reports we need to have, locking down ticket sales at a certain hour after the show is over, that sort of thing. Sean and I still need to finish up the Chroma iPhone app.

But maybe this is a way for us to get concrete very quickly. Maybe this is a way for us to become useful to a (probably very small) number of people sooner rather than later.

We won’t make it a big, huge, grand announcement. We’ll just open it up. See if anyone finds it useful, and then get back to work on making it better.

I mean, it’s not going to hurt anyone if it’s NOT useful. All of this stuff will be free. The iPhone app will be free, the cash sales processing and reporting will be free, all of it. And it will stay free. So if we roll this out and it doesn’t do anyone any good, hey, no problem! You can at least play with it, and it’ll be out in the world, and it’ll gives us something to build on for the next iteration, and the next, and the next, until we’ve got the credit card processing, and the seating charts, and all the other stuff we want to put in it, but can only do one step at a time.

BUT. If you, or someone you know, actually does just care about cash sales? We need to talk. You need to be part of our beta group and tell us how to make this thing work for you. Seriously. Leave a comment below or email me: chris@figure53.com

In the meantime

We’re going to get back to updating our sketchbook to show you how our iPhone app works. And how it will also serve to let you take tickets at the door. And how we think we’re going to integrate it with Twilio to optionally let Chroma send an SMS reminder to your patron that they bought a ticket for your show that starts in two hours. And, well, maybe it would even be a nice companion to Square?

Enough with the update

That’s my spiel. I think that gets you pretty well filled in on what we’ve been thinking and doing the last two months.

Now, what I’m dying to know is if you have any thoughts about this.

Stupid?

Cool?

Other ideas about what we should be doing instead?

Gimme the shiggy yo! I really want to know what you think about all this.

We’ll be developing more detailed visualizations (sales per day, and so forth) as well. What would you like to see in this quick view, or in more detailed views?

If you’re interested in the technical details, read on…

In any case: it works!