Introduction
ListYourShow is BookMyShow's list your own live event platform. BookMyShow is India's largest ticketing platform for movies, live and online events. ListYourShow enables event organisers to list their event on the platform, set an agreeable ticket price and sell the event.
Problem
An event listed on BookMyShow's platform previously had to go through the following steps:
The above flow made sense for large scale events such as IPL and Sunburn but didn't make sense for the growing number of small scale events hosted on BMS platform. Close to 80% of the events hosted were small scale events: events with footfall less than 500, though their revenue contributed to 40%. BMS Content team was swamped all days of the year to get events up and running on the platform. Seeing an exponential growth in the live events space, this model could no longer scale competitively.
Product Redesign
A new platform was developed for event organisers to on-board as a one-time process. Post on-boarding event organisers could start listing their events by themselves on the platform, subject to moderation by BMS teams. New flow looked something like this:
Dashboard
Event Creation
Event Review
Publish Event
Challenges
1. Events created via ListYourShow platform should adhere to BMS platform quality as well as business constraints.
2. ListYourShow shouldn't disturb the on-going flow which would still be used for marquee events.
3. Diff calculation between different versions of event data.
4. Solving potential race conditions between different versions of published events (events which could be edited both at LYS dashboard as well as internal CMS).
Solution
BMS architecture for live events looked something like below before LYS:
BMS live events architecture after LYS:
1. Event data was be created at LYS but they became actual events in BMS system after the data reached CMS.
2. Event data lifecycle would be as follows:
3. Event data post rejection behaves like draft state with notes why it was rejected, event organiser can correct each of the fields rejected and submit for review again.
4. Post approval event data is pushed to CMS where the data is used to create a BMS event thereby completing its lifecycle.
5. A published event also might undergo changes (although some fields cannot be changed once booking starts for an event, for ex: ticket price), in this case data from CMS is copied into LYS with state as draft. This enables event data to go through its usual process of review, eliminating any special/edge cases to be handled.
Impact
1. About 70K events published using ListYourShow, enabling a huge number of small scale event organisers.
2. Reduced content management team fatigue by a significant margin.