Every ticketing platform sits next to your website.
ScreamTix replaces it.

Let us deal with the obvious problem first

You have a website you paid a lot for, and we have just told you it is going away.

Your site probably looks excellent. You’ve spent real money making it exactly right, and the idea of migrating it into a ticketing platform likely fills you with dread. That reaction is reasonable. It is also the single biggest reason producers stay in a setup that is costing them far more than the migration would.

If you join us, you will get a dedicated server in a local datacentre. You’ll get full CSS control over your ScreamTix site — not a background colour and a logo upload, but the real thing — so the design can be recreated to the point where your customers will not be able to tell that anything changed. Our own developers run the transition with you rather than handing you a migration guide, and they stay with you for as long as you are with us.

We are not asking you to accept a worse website in exchange for better software. We are telling you that the website and the ticketing being the same system is the only way to get the benefits ScreamTix offers without dozens of hacks and automations holding your IT systems together.

Our origin story

Every platform demos beautifully. You find out what it cannot do in month three.

Before we built ScreamTix we worked our way through most of the major providers. We sat through the demos. Nothing in a demo is dishonest — it is just that you tend to evaluate a demo against the events you are producing now, not the ones you will produce tomorrow. These issues surface later, on a Saturday, with a customer on the phone who wants to do something that your current system simply cannot do. Developers call these edge-cases, producers call them headaches. Another ticketing provider reaches out, demos its software, and the cycle begins again.

We run award-winning immersive experiences and escape rooms. Some are public, where anyone can join a session until it sells out. Others are private, where only the original booker and their friends should be able to join. Every platform we tried claimed to handle escape rooms and private experiences. None of them actually modelled a private slot properly.

So we did what everybody in this industry does. We set a global capacity of one, and created ticket types called “2 Players”, “3 Players”, “4 Players”, so that the first order would take the timeslot off sale. On other platforms we built elaborate ticket bundles instead, which were the same workaround wearing a different hat.

Then a customer would want to add a player.

That meant manually making the event private with a password (so it wouldn’t be nabbed by another customer during the exchange process) and changing the capacity, or refunding the “2 Players” ticket so they could buy a “3 Players” one. With tiered pricing they then had to pay the difference between two products that were never really products. Some platforms made this less painful than others. On average it cost fifteen minutes of staff time, against a twenty-five pound ticket.

That is a strange position for a business to be in: quietly hoping your customers spend less money with you because your ticketing system makes the transaction unbearable. We were not badly run. We were running a live experience on software written for a shop.

The fundamental problem

Shows are not t-shirts and capacity is not stock.

Nearly every ticketing platform is an e-commerce system in costume. The show is a product. The timeslot is an attribute of that product, like a size. The remaining places are inventory. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it, and every workaround you have ever built starts to make sense: you were translating a live performance into a shop’s vocabulary, by hand, several times a day.

ScreamTix does not start there. A performance is a performance. A private group is a real thing that exists across more than one order. An attendee is a person rather than a checkout field. That is not a marketing distinction. It is the reason the following is possible at all.

One ScreamTix feature, in full

A guardian ratio, a group that books in stages, tiered pricing and why this is much harder than it looks.

One of our shows accepts under-16s. Our risk assessment requires one guardian for every six children, on a maximum capacity of eighteen. Straightforward enough to state. Now watch what happens when real people book it.

The first four tickets are bought. The cart enforces the rule correctly: four under-16s are allowed only if a guardian is present, and that guardian might be an adult ticket or an adult concession ticket. Two different products satisfying the same requirement. Not straightforward, but fine so far.

Then a friend of the family comes along and wants to add two more children to the same private booking. This is legitimate — the group already has enough guardians for six children. But the new order is a separate transaction. Unless the system evaluates that basket against every completed order already attached to that private group, it has no idea whether the ratio still holds, and it will either wrongly block the sale or wrongly allow it.

Now lets factor in tiered pricing. Tiered pricing means the larger the group, the lower the price per head — four children at £25 each, six at £20. Book all six together and the group pays £120. Book four now and add two later, and a system that prices each order on its own takes £100 for the first four and then charges the pair at the two-person rate, so the same six children on the same slot pay more than they would have in one transaction. Customers work this out quickly, and the rational move becomes waiting until the group is finalised before booking anything — the exact opposite of what you want from a private booking.

That is one feature, described properly. There are years of them, each built the same way: because a show we were running needed it that week. We are not going to list them here, and a feature grid would not tell you anything useful anyway. We would rather show you the ones that matter to your operation, in an hour, with the system open in front of us.

What matters more than any individual feature is the reason they can all exist together.

Why it has to be one system

Producer-led features are half of it. The other half is that nothing gets handed over.

A better booking engine on its own would still have left us where we were: unable to describe a single customer completely. The moment your ticketing is a component rather than the site itself, the journey starts being passed between products.

The advert knows where the visitor came from. The website knows what they looked at. The ticketing platform knows what they bought. The waiver tool knows who filled in a form. The email platform knows which list they landed on. None of them can see the customer.

You built your own website precisely because sending paid traffic into somebody else’s generic booking page gives you insufficient control over how your experiences are sold. But from the moment your customer leaves your website to pay (even via an integrated widget on your site), the sales journey and the transaction are being recorded in different places by different companies via different pixels or methods.

Google Ads will tell you accurately which campaign closed a sale. That is not the same as telling you the truth about what marketing activities are driving your business. It cannot tell you what first brought that person to you months earlier.

The best was to explain this is with a real example of a booking journey.

One booking, followed all the way through

Why that matters on Monday morning

We finally know where to invest.

Count what a conventional stack would have recorded from that story. A conversion, attributed to whichever campaign was running when the card was charged. One customer, being the person who paid. A mailing list entry. Nothing about the poster, nothing about Snapchat, nothing about the attendee who became a new customer months later.

Google Ads is not lying to you when it reports what closed. It is answering a smaller question than the one you need answered, because the rest of the story happened outside its view. Bottom-of-funnel campaigns will always look like the heroes, because they are standing closest to the transaction when it happens.

With the whole journey in one dataset we can see which asset group, in which ad group, in which campaign, brought somebody in for the first time — and then whether they actually booked, actually attended, what they spent, and whether they came back or brought anyone with them. Printed media stops being an act of faith. Organic sharing becomes visible. Landing page copy can be judged on the customers it produced rather than the clicks it collected.

We stopped asking other companies to tell us about our own customers.

Who we are looking for

We are not trying to sign hundreds of venues. We are trying to find about five.

That is not false scarcity. Every ScreamTix customer gets their own server, a migration run by our developers and access to those developers for as long as they are with us. That is only an honest promise at a small number, so a small number is what we are taking.

If your setup works, you are content keeping your website, ticketing, communication and reporting separate, and what you want is a lower percentage per ticket, there are plenty of good options and we will happily tell you so.

ScreamTix starts to make sense when you want to know what happened between the first visit and the next booking without reassembling it from four products. And if your ticketing has also reached the point where private groups, timed capacity, ticket relationships, changing group sizes and operational rules are being held together with workarounds, it solves that as well.

We spent twenty years dealing with both. If any of the above sounded like a description of your week, we would like to spend an hour showing you the parts that broke for us and what we did about them.