Seat Exchange

Challenge

SeatExchange was a relatively new entrant into the highly competitive online ticket buying and selling industry. With competitors like StubHub and TicketsNow being acquired by large organizations, SeatExchange was faced with the challenge of redesigning its website and upgrading its eCommerce platform to allow for increased features and functionality. SeatExchange also operates in the UK, and has a corporate product that large corporations use to track and assign their ticket inventories. With this diverse level of activity and rapid growth, SeatExchange needed a strategy and architecture to support its needs.

Solution

lyonscg conducted an independent assessment of the current website, and developed recommendations and a 90-Day plan to address immediate critical needs. In parallel, lyonscg assumed the role of Interim CIO and created a long-term strategy to be implemented over the next year, to get SeatExchange on par with its competition from a technology standpoint. As part of this process, lyonscg held strategy sessions with SeatExchange personnel to gather requirements and develop a detailed requirements document. Using this requirements document, lyonscg developed an implementation plan. As part of the implementation, lyonscg incorporated best-of-breed software packages to make maintenance easier, and to enhance the customer service functionality. lyonscg also implemented new search capabilities, making it easier and more intuitive for customers to find the tickets they are looking for. lyonscg also moved the development and production environments to a redundant, hosted facility, and implemented new change control and testing processes. From an eMarketing standpoint, lyonscg implemented a SEO/SEM strategy to ensure that SeatExchange is included on any search for hot tickets. This strategy is using organic search for recurring events and pay-per-click search for non-recurring, one- time events, and using analytics tools to closely track effectiveness. This strategy is being deployed in the US and in the UK. In additional, landing pages and micro-sites are being utilized to highlight special offers, partnerships with leagues and universities, and hot properties. Based on all these changes, SeatExchange has experienced increased monthly sales each month, and is providing its customers with greater ease of use and better customer service and support. This project launched a whole business opening the site in Europe - a whole new line of business for SeatExchange. Extending their online brand into the European market.

Platform

custom .net solution

Services

custom eCommerce development