Eventbrite is a global self-service ticketing platform for experiences that lets anyone create, share, find, and attend events that fuel their passions and enrich their lives. In 2019 alone, the company powered more than 4.7 million events and served more than 949,000 event creators.

Eventbrite’s customers need many integrations, so the company’s original approach was to have third-party builds via a self-serve public marketplace. Unfortunately, integration quality was inconsistent, and because development was out of their hands, the team had no ability to update or maintain them over time. Getting fixes or updates was a painful process required contacting third parties that weren’t always responsive, and there was no clear way to monitor integration performance. 

After a particularly challenging experience maintaining an unreliable third-party integration, Senior Director of Product Dan Peterson and his team realized that Eventbrite needed to find a way to ensure that integrations on the marketplace met their high standard of quality without requiring considerable resource investment from their developers. “In the past, it would take a full engineering squad of four to six developers plus a product manager one quarter to build and launch a single integration. And that doesn’t include the ongoing maintenance required to keep up with bug fixes, API updates, and other changes, and we would have had to continue providing that post-integration support pretty much forever.”

Eventbrite didn’t want just any integration solution. The team needed a solution so seamlessly connected with its marketplace that customers didn’t know it was there. “Event creators are tech-savvy problem-solvers that are comfortable using any number of tools to execute their events,” adds Peterson. “But that doesn’t mean they are willing to buy additional software to tap into the integrations that should be available on our marketplace. Most integration solutions put the burden on the customer to solve the problem.”

Eventbrite partnered with the team at Tray.ai to build a new integration for one of its most popular services, which accounts for more than $15M in revenue, to replace the third-party solution that it was struggling with before. “Our great relationship with the team at Tray was instrumental in getting this project off the ground,” notes Peterson. “They had a clear understanding of what we were trying to accomplish and approached the project with a level head, no ego.”

Once the integration was live, Peterson and his team didn’t need to spend time maintaining integrations. “We know that after the integrations get built, keeping track of API updates from other tools is no longer a problem for our team, since we’re confident we can work them out with the Tray team.” The Eventbrite team also appreciated Tray’s analytics tools, which surface performance data to diagnose any challenges its customers encountered within an hour of receiving the ticket.

Since launching its first integration using Tray Universal Automation Cloud, the Eventbrite team has seen an incredibly positive response. "Tray has exceeded our expectations as a solution that delivers high-quality, self-maintained integrations for our customers, says Peterson. “Since implementing the platform, we’ve doubled the customer rating on one of the most popular integrations on our public marketplace. Before, it was 1.9 stars. Now, it is close to 5.”

“From an efficiency perspective, we’ve cut the number of engineers needed to build out an integration from six or more to just one engineer and one product manager. Those other engineers can now focus on other critical projects, including developing our core product and building out even more integrations,” Peterson explains.

“Not to mention, reliable customer integrations provide some intangible benefits. Fewer customer integration issues helps ease the burden on our support team and keeps our customers satisfied, which in turn can help retention. We've even seen support ticket volume decrease from 200 to about two or three a week.”