As an event organiser, one of the most frustrating things to hear from ticket buyers is that they are struggling to buy tickets to your event. Surely that's the whole reason you're paying a ticketing company to help you, right? To make sure that your guests can book their tickets as quickly and as easily as possible?

In short. Yes. That’s exactly why you pay a ticketing company. Luckily, we’re here to help you gain some insight into the top reasons why people might struggle to buy tickets online and how to educate your ticket buyers properly as well as direct them to the solution they may need.

By far the most common issue encountered in South Africa when it comes to buying stuff online, including event tickets, is that the card being used in the transaction by the customer is not registered with 3D Secure. ☹

South African banks and e-commerce merchants have implemented 3D Secure to help protect cardholders against unauthorised use of their cards when shopping online with 3D Secure merchants. It basically provides an extra step during the online payment process to ensure that only the cardholder is using the card. In this step, your ticket buyer is asked to enter a One Time Pin (OTP) or a previously selected PIN/Password letting their bank know that it's them shopping online.

You may have encountered it when shopping online yourself. 3D Secure is also known as Verified by Visa, MasterCard SecureCode or Amex Safekey.

If a ticket buyer has never used their card for an online purchase before, it's possible that their card may not be registered with 3D Secure, in which case all they need to do is to contact their bank and ask them to register the card. It's very quick and worthwhile to do so, especially now that all South African companies are required to use 3D Secure for online payments. Once that is done, the ticket buyer can make the purchase again and should have no further issues. 🙂

It's also important to note that the OTP sent during the transaction are sent from the bank, not the ticketing platform itself.

Even if someone's card is registered with 3D secure, sometimes their bank may flag their purchase as a risk payment which means that the payment will not be authorised. Which means that it won’t go through. This happens when the purchase you’re about to complete looks out of the usual spending patterns for the person, and so rather than having the funds come off the person's account incorrectly, the bank blocks the payment until they have clarified with the account holder if it is indeed them attempting to make the payment. Sure, this can come across as an inconvenience, but it is good that the bank looks out for you in the way it does.

We find this happens quite often with international purchases. If it does happen, your ticket buyer simply needs to contact their bank and ask them to remove the flag of the purchase being made with their card. It often happens to us when we’re buying weird bits and bobs for our end of year party. I mean, it’s not every day you buy an inflatable sumo suit.

If a ticket buyer is running a browser that has not been updated or is not set to auto-update, they might often find themselves running into numerous problems throughout their web-browsing journey, not just on Quicket. “But surely a browser is a browser and it should just work, right?” Unfortunately not.

The same goes for ticket buyers that have willingly disabled some of the building blocks of the internet like javascript (often done by individuals who are over-enthusiastic about their privacy settings. We’re not saying Mark Zuckerberg isn’t personally spying on your web usage history and stats, we’re just saying that sometimes javascript runs for a reason). Another repeat offender of issues are users who have installed numerous Ad blockers or strange browser extensions should that then lead to a plethora of problems across their internet experience.

All of these hurdles are easily side-stepped and can even fit within your ad-blocking, privacy-upholding needs, so long as you check the right options in the settings.

No matter your employer’s corporate policies or the stability of your connection, there are a few solutions that can help, like using a different device that might play nicer with the network that your ticket buyer is connected to, or even better, switching to mobile data if they're on a phone or a tablet, which will disconnect them from the either intermittent or restricted network.

We know ‘woes’ seems a little dramatic, but lets be honest, when your email doesn’t do what you want it to do, well, those are trying times. Woeful, you might even say.

See, similarly to being restricted from a data security point of view with certain websites, some workplaces may block emails incoming to their employees work email addresses. Your ticket buyer may claim that Quicket didn’t send them the ticket, but this is an automatic process - the ticket is always sent automatically to the email address supplied. If that email is not received, it may well be that the server has blocked it from delivering to their work mailbox due to their own security protocols.

If they're Gmail user, it may simply be that the email is in their Promotions folder and they simply need to search the word "Quicket" in their mailbox.

Another thing that ticket buyers may not realise is that they can log into the Quicket website using the email address used while purchasing the tickets and access their tickets straight from their account - no hunting of emails necessary and certainly no wild-goose chases through your work’s security protocol manual. If it's the first time that the ticket buyer has bought a ticket on Quicket using that particular email address, they'll need to set a password for it first, but once logged in their tickets are ready and easily accessible. No need to fight with Thinus from IT.

So, if someone’s struggling to buy tickets, it helps to keep the above points in mind in case you ever have a frustrated ticket buyer contacting you so that you can easily direct them to a solution. Of course, it also helps to remember that ticketers such as Quicket have a dedicated support centre trained to handle each and every query as efficiently as possible. In any of these instances, your ticket buyer should feel free to contact us on [email protected] or +27 21 424 9308 and we'll be able to look into their transaction, advise them of the issue, and help them resolve it.

If all else fails and your ticket buyer still can't buy a ticket, know that no website is perfect. The Quicket platform has 99.9% up-time so if none of the above reasons are to blame, you can check the status of the Quicket website at status.quicket.co.za - if there is ever any issue, we have developers on standby to sort it out and get things running again in no time.

There you have it, 5 ways to put control back into your ticket buying customers hands so they can get to buying the tickets to your event they so desperately want to attend. To make sure you cover your tracks as an event organiser, read our guide on the reasons people don't buy tickets to your event even when there aren't any issues.

After all, when all is said and done, we at Quicket are doing our best to ensure the most common thing said by our event organisers and the people who buy tickets to their event a resounding, “This thing works”