Just in time for new fete season and Carnival 2023, Marvin Marcelle has launched an app and website called eboxtickets. He said the app was created specifically for event promoters to keep track of sales, tickets, income and other aspects of within the events realm.
Marcelle, the CEO of eboxtickets, said the focus was on improving the business flow of events. He said as a DJ under the name 4 Play, he saw the rush and chaos that stemmed from promoters not having proper technological resources to help track sales and even make the entry process for patrons smoother.
“I just wanted to bring my two experiences together which would be entertainment and technology to spring board into the application.”
He added, “What we want to do is have a lot more promoters understand the app, and have them post their events on the app and get their analytics. This app works for venues, event organisers, so it’s really robust and resilient.”
Marcelle said he is not taking sole credit and thanked his team for their contribution to the app and for their experiences which helped guide them.
“We’ve really taken a lot of our personal experiences together with what we believe what promoters would need to come up with the application.”
Marcelle is also the CEO and founder of eboxticket’s parent company – eboxtenders Ltd, which was launched in 2016 to manage procurement processes for private and public sectors. The company manages the process from the request to execution.
While speaking to Business Day, Marcelle explained how the app works from a promoter’s account. The first screen upon logging in is the home screen where the user will see its events, the amount of tickets to be distributed, the amount sold and the income.
The information is detailed and accompanied with charts, one of which is a sales graph depicting the amount of sales per day from the start. Marcelle explained that people can purchase their tickets with their debit and credit cards or cash which is not a feature that can be found easily for sites and apps like these.
“We are truly pleased to develop an app which caters to event promoters and partygoers in time for all the parties and fetes. This app will ensure tickets are sold to your targeted audience. We started this project in July, and right away we decided we would accept debit cards and cash, as there are many people who do not own credit cards.”
He explained how the cash option would work for those opting to use it and said the person would be prompted to enter the amount of tickets they want to buy and would be directed to a committee member of eboxtickets to arrange payment. Marcelle said once the payment is approved the person will get access to the ticket through the app with a QR code that would be scanned upon entry to the event.
Eboxticket will also allow promoters to scan tickets through their phones, making operations go through faster resulting in customers not having to wait in a long line.
As for committee members, they would see how many people bought tickets, their names, the quantity and the amount of money paid. The amount and type of tickets can be found on a committee member's information card which has a green symbol on the right. This would show how the committee is performing.
Referencing an incident with Ticketmaster, a site based in the US for similar operations, where people ran into countless problems while trying to buy tickets to a Taylor Swift concert despite pre-ordering, Marcelle said he doesn’t foresee running into issues like these.
“We host our platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and we have specifically taken up a functionality called elastic compute, so depending on the bandwidth that is required, and the bandwidth is the number of people that hit the site to buy tickets all at the same time, the site is smart enough to scale on its own.”
Marcelle described the use of a highway to bring his point across.
“Let’s picture going down a one-lane highway – one car on the lane at any time and you want to assume you want to have 1,000 cars using that same one-lane highway, what you are going to get is a bottleneck. Now, let’s picture we have a ten-lane highway, same 1,000 cars, but now that there are ten lanes, the highway can accommodate so many more cars all at the same time.”
He said elastic compute is something that can expand and contrast when needed, so there’d be one lane to facilitate the traffic and if necessary, more lanes can be opened to let traffic move smoothly.
Marcelle added that in light of recent ransomware attacks since the pandemic he knows that TT will not spared from attacks like these.
“We have taken precautionary measures to build into these applications especially because we will be storing information like credit and debit card numbers. Our teams have actually gone a long way to make sure that all the information that has been stored on the site is bulletproof and it’s something that we will continue to ensure.”