Creating a personalized, professional ticketing experience for any business, powered by Square APIs

Building a unique product

SimpleTix founder Aron Kansal first started tinkering with an event ticketing solution in college, over ten years ago. What began as a ticketing page he built in Adobe Dreamweaver for a small theater in Canada has now evolved into a flexible, full-service ticketing platform for thousands of venues.

“I learned through my work as a freelance web designer that many venues needed an affordable way to create a professional event ticketing experience,” Kansal said of founding SimpleTix. “As SimpleTix has evolved, we have differentiated with a product that can be personalized to each customer.”

Compared to competitors with a standardized approach, SimpleTix puts the client’s brand front-and-center, making the ticketing page look and feel like it was built in-house. They can create a single-event page for individual events and festivals, or a complete events listing page for a venue with a full slate of events. The latter option is built to look exactly like any other page on the client’s website, creating a consistent experience for the end-customer. They can also create custom seating charts — key for venues selling tickets to events with assigned seats.

Integrating with Square

SimpleTix’s customers were the main drivers for Kansal to integrate his product with Square. “One theater in New York City really pushed us to offer Square as a payments partner,” he told us. He found our ECommerce API and quickly had a solution up and running.

Kansal pointed to two features in particular that sold him on the Square integration (beyond fulfilling an increasingly popular customer request!).

First, he loves the oauth permissioning process, which makes for a seamless onboarding experience. His clients do not need to copy and paste any keys or configure anything. Oauth is simple, secure, and fast. Plus, anyone without a Square account can set one up in minutes during SimpleTix’s onboarding — much less onerous than a typical payments signup process.

Second, Square is unique in that it enables his venues to sell both online (with SimpleTix) and in-person (with Square Point of Sale), creating an integrated multi-channel sales solution. Many of his customers use Square POS to sell tickets at the door, and SimpleTix is able to send the tickets directly to the customer’s phone instantly.

In addition to providing online ticket booking powered by Square, SimpleTix also enables its clients to use Square’s hardware and POS app to sell tickets at the door.

Integrating with Square has also brought in new business for SimpleTix: “We have gotten much better leads from Square than we have from any other partner,” Kansal said. “Most of our customers are really happy with our product and the Square integration, so they refer us to other theaters managers, conference organizers, and festival organizers.” In just a few months, he had a wave of customers signing up and using Square for their SimpleTix account.

Multi-Party Transaction Implementation

With the launch of Multi-Party transaction capabilities through Square’s E-commerce API, SimpleTix added a way to charge their clients a flat, per-ticket fee as part of the payment flow. This provides a revenue stream for SimpleTix that is aligned with their clients’ growth. When an event performs well, SimpleTix also benefits from the service they provided in helping their client succeed.

Their multi-party settlement implementation is pretty straightforward:

(Note: To learn more about implementing your own multi-party settlement solution for online payments, see instructions in the announcement blog post.)

What’s next?

SimpleTix is hoping to take their platform in-person next, by building a SimpleTix Point-of-Sale app that processes through Square. This will enable them to create a more cohesive multi-channel experience for their customers, leveraging Square’s payment processing and hardware.