Ticketmaster has been named in a new study as being among a group of major companies that are losing out on sales due to user experience issues on mobile platforms.
The ticket giant was included in a report compiled by technical marketing agency Erudite, which said Adidas and Next are also missing out on a significant commercial opportunity.
Erudite studied the performance of the UK’s top 1,000 websites to see if the digital leaders are adapting to their audience. It said that 16 per cent were found wanting.
According to the report, Ticketmaster does not load within 10 seconds on 3G and content is not sized effectively for mobile devices. Ticketmaster failed on four of the five criteria identified by Erudite.
“Around 53 per cent of customers will give up on a web page which takes more than three seconds to load, yet the average load time on sites in this survey was 19 seconds. We have seen evidence that every second of site speed improvement relates to an extra two per cent in conversion rates,” said Nichola Stott, managing director at Erudite.
“Only 33 per cent of UK retailers managed to deliver any interactivity in less than 10 seconds on a 3G connection. This lack of speed is frustrating for customers and is quite literally throwing away money along with goodwill.
“Yet, very few sites have started to take advantage of Progressive Web App (PWA) features, small technical changes that that could massively improve customers’ experience.”
Ticketsource failed in two of the categories, with Ticketweb failing three.
The report comes during the same week that many fans at the College Football Playoff national title game in the US had difficulties entering the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta because of a glitch with the Ticketmaster-powered mobile app.
The game, between the Georgia Bulldogs and the Alabama Crimson Tide, was Ticketmaster’s first major championship sporting event in North America that required most fans to use mobile tickets instead of paper ones.
Some faced a glitch in the CFP app – an updated iOS version correcting a problem with adding tickets was offered two days before the game – or lost battery on their mobile devices and had to go to the box office to receive an SMS version of their ticket or hard stock.
But Ticketmaster told SportTechie that it considered the event a success as the issues affected only about one per cent of mobile ticket users, or a few hundred people out of the 51,113 total mobile ticket entries.
“From our perspective it worked amazingly well,” Greg Economou, Ticketmaster North America’s head of sports and chief commercial officer, told SportTechie.
According to Ticketmaster, a small number of fans experienced minor entry delays due to tickets purchased from unofficial sources, which Ticketmaster resolved before kickoff.
Around 75 per cent of those who attended used mobile tickets. SportTechie reported that most of the 17,000 paper tickets used were given out by the teams, league or to VIPs, as fraudulent tickets went from thousands in a typical game to just a handful.
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