Explara has acquired Bangalore-based entertainment ticketing company IndianStage.in for an equity plus cash deal.
IndianStage.in has been in operation since 2008, has ticketed for over 12000 events in 21 cities across India and abroad. It has served well over 500,000 patrons enabling them to attend live performances. Indianstage Acquired By Explara
Post acquisition, Founders of IndianStage.in, Baskar Ethirajan and Sajesh Nair, will join the Explara management team. The sales & biz devteam of IndianStage across various cities will continue to drive the business under Explara.
The Blume funded startups will use the synergry to strengthen Explara’s entertainment vertical. IndianStage.in customers will be steadily transitioned to Explara’s solutions platform. IndianStage.in site will remain operational and it might get a new avatar to stay connected to the entertainment community.
Event ticketing platform #explara now supports 23 currencies and has partnered with local operators in countries like Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, UK & USA.
Explara will facilitate direct payment processing using global payment gateways from US and local countries with these partners.
In various local markets, Explara aims to partner for localized Event Apps for event-day, pre-event and post-events solutions via its Event Apps/Marketplace model.
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Now you can sell event tickets from anywhere using #explara’s newly launched mobile point of sale (PoS) app. The app has an in-built payment gateway to process payments at different desk points.
To use the app, users can select events they wish to sell, add member staff and use the in-built payment to process card and wallet payments. There is no limit to the number of staff that can be added to the app. The PoS also provides sales review reports for each staff. The sales team can also login from their own devices
The app is currently available only on Android and can be downloaded from the Play Store.
The PoS is set to simplify the ticketing, payment collection and inventory/sales co-ordination process. Recently, Explara had launched the Entriz app that makes entry point management at event registration desks paperless.
Tired of managing the the registration desk at your events? With all the chaos and confusion at event desks, most organizers have a tough time managing the attendees signing in.
Entriz, an app by event management platform #explara, will come to your rescue in such a situation.
Explara has launched its entry management app for event organizers to make entry point management at event registration desks a paperless affair. Event organizers can now validate attendee ticket/registration, manage multiple entry points and check status of attendees in real time.
The app by Explara, formerly known as Ayojak, will help the event desk validate attendees email or ticket id using the app’s built-in Barcode/QR code scanner .
Registration desks can now login to their Explara account, select the events they want to manage, setup event desk/gate entry point with more than one team members to manage and validate attendee ticket/registration through the app.
How Entriz App Works?
Once the registration desk logs in to their Explara account, through the app, they will have to select the event to be managed from the list of all events managed through their Explara account.
The app can be configured to add any number of entry team members to manage different entry points and each team member can independently operate the checkin process.
After the event is selected, the registration desk can now start checking in the attendees using their email id used for ticket booking, ticket id issued during booking or by scanning their ticket QR-code using the app’s built in scanner. If all else fails, i.e you don’t remember your ticket-id or booking email id or your smartphone, the desk can manually go through the list of attendees and mark them.
The desk can also access instant report on information like how many attendees have checked-in, who hasn’t checked-in yet, what is the total number of attendees etc. This data can come in especial handy to manage the start time of the event.
Registration desks are one of the most crowded and difficult to manage spots at any events, especially. Those long and lengthy attendee printouts, especially when not in order, are difficult to cross check and verify using the traditional pen and paper process. An app that can ease the burden on personals attending to the registrations desk will make organizing any event easier.
In June 2013 Ayojak had re-branded itself as Explara, in a bid to reach out to a wider audience.
Earlier in December 2013, the platform also launched a Developer & Marketplace program to invite app developers, solution providers and service providers to offer their solutions and services via Explara platform API and an Event Marketplace, a solution for event organizers to offer their services as plug and play apps to their customers.
The iOS version of the app is in the works and will be launched soon.
Event and ticketing site #explara has launched Event Marketplace, a solution for event organizers to offer their services as plug and play apps to their customers. The service will be offered through Explara’s own apps marketplace (both mobile apps and web apps) and via partnering service providers like venue booking, event management companies and event support services.
The company has also launched a ‘Developer & Marketplace program‘to invite app developers, solution providers and service providers to offer their solutions and services via Explara platform API &
Explara for developers is available here. It supports OAuth2 protocol for API access.
Explara offers 3 types of API
1. Event & Registration API : Take explara event creation process, your own event listings and attendee data to your home!
2. Booking API: Offer registration related services booking!
3. Publisher API: List events on your site by selecting the event category that suits your site!
Explara Marketplace is currently in Beta with few live apps and few apps in coming soon mode. The company is working with over 20 solution providers to integrate their applications to the platform.
The service will also offer an extended hosting platform on cloud for developers who would like to validate the usefulness of their app integrated with Explara APIs.
For any event organizer, online ticketing service is an important aspect of the event and for the last UnPluggd, we used 4 ticketing options.
In fact, this was the first UnPluggd conference where we didn’t even add an option to ‘pay at venue‘- i.e. our focus was mostly on maximizing the online conversion.
The Online Ticketing Services We Used for UnPluggd
For the sake of discussion, I am removing PayUPaisa from the list, as I believe the solution is more geared towards smaller merchants and we generally found the product to be a bit unstable (discount codes didn’t work well).
First, the Average Conversion Ratio
Before I share the conversion ratio, let me mention that there is no standard way these ticketing sites define ‘view’. For example, is ‘View’ defined as view to the event payment page? Is number of widget impressions also added to the view?
I believe, it’s the former. For the sake of clarity, MeraEvents views aren’t clear – the dashboard doesn’t contain any detail (that I could find), so I looked at the numbers that were shared in the daily emails.
Instamojo’s high conversion is primarily because of the simpler checkout process – the widget is way too cool as opposed to any other payment platform.
Ticketing Site : Online Conversion
Features Important to any Event Organizer
1. Daily Reports Delivered Via Email.
Any event organizer would want a daily report on number of views and sales conversion. This helps one gauge marketing RoI and unless you have a dedicated analytics team, you won’t get all the time to go through GA and track conversions on ticketing sites.
Given that most of the organizers are (probably) too busy organizing the event, an email with daily reports just adds to the stickiness.
As of this date, only MeraEvents sends out daily emails and I must say that it’s pretty well done.
2. Attendee Details.
So somebody buys 5 tickets – wouldn’t you as an organizer want to collect the names of all 5 attendees? Explara and MeraEvents do a neat job. Instamojo needs to get it’s act together – even the attendee report doesn’t capture the number of tickets bought by the buyer. For event organizer, this is a huge pain (imagine the scene at registration desk!).
3. Dashboard.
Okay. Who cares about the dashboard? How much of your marketing efforts impacted conversion? What was the traffic source like?
Big shout to Instamojo for their awesome dashboard. Explara does a decent job, though needs to improve.
MeraEvents has a long way to go.
4. Ticketing : Pricing/Cancellation/Refund/Setting up policies.
Refunds/Name change etc features needs to be standardized. None of the solutions offer a comprehensive view, though organizers get a lot of such last minute requests.
A self-serving platform is an ideal way to go.
In terms of pricing, Instamojo has a standard pricing package (5% of transaction), followed by Explara (Rs. 15/convenience fee + 3.99%). MeraEvents has a complex pricing option, which is more geared towards event marketing solution than pure ticketing.
5. Adding more accounts with different ACLs
Except Explara, others do not allow addition of more accounts to administer the event (correct me, if I am wrong?). This is a basic feature request, I believe.
6. Post-Event
Collecting attendee feedback is important and while organizers will do their own bit, these features could be enabled by the ticketing platforms. It just makes them more useful and meaningful than just being a ‘transaction play’.
Only MeraEvents does a good job of this.
7. Failed Transactions
Now, this is interesting. As an event organizer, you should be in the know of failed transactions and why they failed. Both Explara and MeraEvents offer a feature around this, but the feature is almost hidden.
I believe, they should provide a support solution and reach out to customers whose transactions failed, citing reasons. This just makes the entire process more transparent.
There are various other aspects of event organization (like replacing the ticketing platform’s support contact details with event organizers’ details in the ticket) etc etc that are important to look at, but I would recommend the above online ticketing companies to look at easing the life of an event organizer and also, focus on analytics part.
Agreed that 90% of your customers don’t care about analytics, but it’s just a matter of time that they will start evaluating your solution against competition and importantly, will revisit their marketing RoI.
TL; DR: Long way to go. Most of these companies have reached a product-market fit. The actual product needs some serious improvement.
What has been your experience with the online ticketing services?
* We did try using DoAttend, but by that time, we were exhausted with the different options we were using for ticketing – so decided to not go ahead with it.
Event ticketing platform Ayojak has rebranded itself as Explara, in a bid to reach out to a wider audience. The platform, which can be used by organisers to list their events or sell tickets and by visitors to discover events, has also cut prices for organisers.
The rebranding comes after 4 years, at a time when the company plans to expand its reach and operations geographically.
In a blogpost on Wednesday, the company said: “With rebranding, the product has been designed to ensure that we can have a lean team which will be able to scale from 300 events a month to 3000 events per month.”
The company, which operates in the B2B event management industry, thinks that an event or activity goes beyond the usual and should have more social touch to it.
Explara has 3 main goals that it wants to be in its new avatar
An Event Discovery & Solutions Platform
A destination to explore what’s happening around
Getting ready to serve markets across the globe
The rebranded platform will also come with more affordable pricing for the organizers. The service also plans to introduce a similar pricing model for the rest of the world. Other than India the company has already served event organizers from USA, UK, South Africa, Singapore and Philippines.
The service will also have a new recommendations engine, which the it hopes to take live by mid July.
Tired of managing the the registration desk at your events? With all the chaos and confusion at event desks, most organizers have a tough time managing the attendees signing in.
Once the registration desk logs in to their Explara account, through the app, they will have to select the event to be managed from the list of all events managed through their Explara account.
Event and ticketing site 
