M-commerce is the solution for ticket issues, writes expert

Thursday, August 23, 2012 - 11:36 by Sarah Collinson

In an article for MarketingWeek, the various pitfalls of the Olympic ticketing system have been outlined and analysed by Sebastian Joseph, who suggests that harnessing an m-commerce platform might have helped to alleviate the issues.

In the early days of the games, there were many criticisms levelled against the organisers because there were large numbers of seats left empty, despite events being advertised as completely sold out.

This was apparently due to corporate sponsors and Olympic officials not using seats that had been designated to them, although even when it was clear that seats were not going to be used, it was difficult for members of the public who were at the park to actually get in to the games.

Mr Joseph suggests that Locog, the organisation responsible for organising most aspects of the games, including ticketing, should have invested in an m-commerce platform, to make it easier for the public to buy unused Olympic tickets using their smartphones.

The Locog ticket website suffered a number of crashes and technical glitches in the run up to the games and was still experiencing sporadic problems while they were taking place, due to large numbers of people visiting the site, to see if they could nab tickets via safe shopping online.

Mr Joseph points to the popularity of m-commerce services in the UK as being an indication that this could have helped matters. The number of people purchasing products through safe shopping online accessed from their smartphones, was up by 356 per cent year on year during June and continues to grow.

The immediacy and portability of m-commerce also makes it a good platform for ticketing. Indeed more and more venues are using m-commerce to sell digital tickets to people, which means that in many places, paper tickets are a thing of the past.