Tech update: Internationalisation, improved marketing features & more!

From frontend developer & scrum master Natalia.

For the past few months, one of our focuses has been to improve the way we work as a team. We’ve been trying to achieve more consistency and regularity in our development process and I’m proud to say: it’s paying off!

Looking back, lots of things were developed in the last month, so let’s dive in a little.

Better dashboard for our event organizers

We work in an iterative and incremental way. This means we’re constantly learning and refining everything we put out there, getting a better version each time. Of course this is not a completely polished system, but you know, we’re iterating. ;)

Based on this way of working, one of our goals for this quarter is to improve some of the current functionalities of our dashboard in order to make the life of the event organizers (and support people at GUTS) a bit easier.

Block categories came into existence
Imagine you’re creating an event, let’s say a comedy show at a theatre. At some point you realize you want to invite your family but they’re not gonna pay for a ticket, so you’d want to just reserve some seats for your mum, your dad and your cousin that are coming to visit that weekend. But not only that, you also need to keep some seats for those technicians that are helping you put up the show, they also deserve to enjoy it!

So, here comes the question: how do you manage those groups of reservations in a user-friendly way?

Until now, if you had to do something like that with our dashboard, it required some creativity. And even though we love out-of-the-box-thinking, we would rather avoid it when it comes to the management of your event.

With the new block categories, this task is way more simple. With a couple of clicks you can create your own category, give it a name and identifier, and add those reserved tickets that, before this, would be floating in a big and unorganized list.

Better ticket invalidation
This was a tricky one and I’m sure we’ll keep working on it, but it is a massive improvement!

With the new flow, event organizers now have way more control on how they do ticket invalidations:

• Type of invalidation: with automatic refund (our system will handle it), manual refund (in case they want to refund cash or the automatic is not available) or no refund at all.
• What happens to the tickets: They could keep them blocked or put them back up for sale.
• Who pays the fee: Either the organizer or the customer.

We’re preparing for international events

We already support multiple languages in our apps, but now we took the next step when it comes to internationalisation: multiple currencies.

From now on, event organizers can decide in which currency they want their event to be sold. Once this is set, all our apps (dashboard, ticket shop, ticket wallet and mobile app) will automatically show the correct currency for that event.

We support all the currencies (yes, all) but the available payment methods will vary depending on the organization and the PSP (Payment Service Provider) they use. For example, if you select Icelandic Krona (fact: one of the few currencies that doesn’t have decimals) and your PSP only allows credit card payment for that currency, that’s what the consumer will see when they’re buying tickets for your event.

More marketing possibilities for event organizers

Until now our events were either available, sold-out or nearly sold-out. But because we have control over the primary and secondary market, we are able to easily provide better insights on these states.

With this advantage we added another state to our events:
‘Primary sold-out with secondary available.’

Meaning an event is sold-out but some people have put some tickets up for sale. This will enable event organizers market their events in a new way and make more informed decisions. How cool is that?

Improved web-based ticket wallet

We take good care of our codebase, that’s why it’s been a goal of ours to get rid of our old web-based ticket wallet (written in Ember for the tech-savvy ones) and convert it into a brand new good-looking-amazing-slick one (written in Vue).

We believe we can give the best services to our customers when they’re using our mobile app. For this reason the web version will, from now on, be a simple ticket wallet that will allow those who don’t own a smartphone to enter their events. Extra functionality (like reselling, sharing, etc.) will only be available through our mobile app.

Quite a list, right? I believe we’re on the right track with our internal processes and this is allowing us to develop stuff better, faster and more consistently. I can’t imagine what’s yet to come! (Kidding, I can, and it’s amazing. So stay put ;))

More about the GET Protocol

Any questions or want to know more about what we do? Join our active Telegram community for any questions you might have, read our whitepaper, visit the website, join the discussion on the GET Protocol Reddit. Or get yourself a smart event ticket in our sandbox environment. Download the GUTS Tickets app on iOS or Android.