SquadUP 2017 Product Year in Review

This year, SquadUP accomplished the company’s most substantial growth to date, and we have our hosts and guests to thank for our success. We are continuously working on new tools to help our hosts throw better events / gain more insights into the data collected from the events. The SquadUP product team has worked hard and made several updates to the SquadUP platform in 2017, including the below:

White Label Checkout
The white label checkout form has been a primary focus for most of our recent product updates. The white label checkout form is incredibly easy to implement (both from SquadUP’s side and the client’s side). The white label form blends seamlessly into the client’s website. The white label form allows our clients to completely control their branding, and keep customers on their site. Clients experience higher conversion rights, better brand presence, and stronger analytics / metrics. There are many relevant parameters that can be turned on / off for the white label, all of which are detailed on docs.squadup.com. I touch on a few of the more interesting parameters below.

Shopping Cart
The addition of shopping cart functionality to the white label form has been a massive success. The shopping cart integrates seamlessly with the white label form, allowing our users to purchase tickets from multiple events in one transaction. We are really the only ticketing company out there that offers the shopping cart functionality within a white label solution.

Masterpass Integration
We worked with Braintree to build Masterpass functionality into our white label embed. We built additional functionality to show / hide Masterpass with a parameter, limit the Masterpass to only Mastercards with a parameter, and hide the credit card form with a parameter. We were the first Braintree client to start transacting via Masterpass.

BIN Verification / Credit Card Verification
Part of the Masterpass integration was limiting Masterpass transactions to ONLY Mastercards. To accomplish this, we built out BIN (Bank Identification Number) Verification and Credit Card Level Verification. This functionality allows hosts to limit accepted credit cards on the event level and on the ticket tier level.

Customizable Tickets (e-ticket and BOCA)
As we learned with the white label implementation, our clients really love their brand. We opened up the ticket customization options for our clients, and the new designs that we have seen are amazing. We offer custom tickets on an event by event level. NYCWFF uses this to display special offers on Mastercard exclusive events. Charleston Wine + Food uses custom tickets to display event sponsors. We created a super simple template, and the ticket designs that we have seen so far are amazing. In addition to customizable e-tickets, we also offer customizable BOCA tickets.

Customizable Invoices / Invoice Payments
In addition to customizable tickets, we updated the ability to customize invoices as well. We now automatically pull the host’s logo and place it on the invoice. We also added the ability to customize the address that appears at the bottom of the invoice. Built on top of these new invoice customization options is the ability to accept invoice payments via the box office. Invoice payments are marked as a separate payment method on the backend, and we built out specific reports to help track down invoice payments. Invoice payments will also appear as a separate line item in the funding info section.

Individual Data Capture
The ability to capture data from every attendee was probably our most requested feature. We now give our hosts 2 options: they can collect data once per order (this was previously the only option), or once per attendee. With individual data capture enabled, a name / email is required for every attendee. Hosts can now have a complete data set on everyone attending the event, as opposed to an incomplete data set containing only information for the ticket purchasers.

Transfer Tickets Functionality
The concept is pretty simple – if you purchase a ticket and can no longer attend the event, you want to transfer that ticket to someone else who can attend the event. Both ticket holders and event hosts can transfer tickets from one guest to another. When a ticket is transferred, the transferee receives an email with a registration link. Once all of the questions have been answered on the registration link, the transferee will receive the ticket to the event. This ensure that all data is up to date and accurate.

Host Dashboard / Reporting Updates + Date Ranges
Our hosts rely on the host dashboard. After introducing the updated dashboard in January of 2016, we have made some pretty substantial updates. We added a bunch of new reports to the reports section, including the All Events Report (gives a ticket tier by ticket tier breakdown of every event, including sales, qty available, etc), All Promotions Report (shows every user who has purchased a ticket with a promo code), Sold Out Events Report (shows which events are sold out, and the Sold Out % on all visible tickets), and Cashouts Report (shows every event and the cashouts associated with those events). On top of the new reports, we added the ability to select a date range for the data within the reports.

Sub-Admins
This is another incredibly powerful feature. This functionality grants hosts the ability to add sub-admins to multiple accounts with an organization. There is granular control over the sub-admin permissioning, so it is easy to give certain permissions to one sub-admin and different permissions to another.

Offline scanning
Our “offline scanning” is legitimate – when there is no internet / cellular reception, all attendee data is downloaded to the device. Valid tickets will scan as valid. If there are multiple entry points, the phones can communicate via BLE (low-energy bluetooth) and form a mesh network. This ensures that the same ticket cannot be scanned at multiple locations. Most other ticketing companies say they have “offline scanning,” but they really mean that all tickets will scan as valid while offline and generate a report of duplicate scans. This functionality was recently put to the test at The German American Festival, where the wifi access was shut down mid-way through the festival. Our offline scanning processed about 30,000 offline tickets.

Advanced Dashboard Search
Our last big project was an update to the dashboard search functionality. The new functionality will make it easy to filter out search results based on granular filter options. These options include Payment Method (Credit Card, PayPal, Apple Pay, Masterpass, Cash, Invoice), Card Type (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, Discover, JCB, Maestro), and Payment Location (Box Office vs Online). Hosts will also have the ability to filter search results based on a date range or payment range and download the results in a .csv file.