As more than one high profile event has found to its cost, there’s nothing worse than having registration crash or slow to a standstill when you launch your big on-sale.

Not only will your social feeds get filled with negative feedback from frustrated fans, but you’ll create a huge headache for yourself when trying to sort it out, offer refunds, reallocate tickets, and encourage back ticket-buyers who’ve been put off by the whole process.

It’s damaging to your relationship with your customers, and can have a long-term impact on your brand. The first ticket buyers in an on-sale are normally your most loyal fans – so it’s even more important that they have a great experience.

To make sure this doesn’t happen to you, don’t take a chance when selecting your ticketing and registration partner. Ask these 5 questions to be confident they have the scale, experience and engineering chops to handle your on-sale.

Question 1: How many engineers do they have?

Handling large on-sales is a really complex, technical feat that involves managing massive fluctuations in server loads, which can often overwhelm sites not used to the spikes in traffic, or cause it to slow down so much that users get exasperated and leave.

You’ll also need to allow people a certain amount of time for people to complete their ticket purchase, but during that time the sale of that ticket is neither complete, nor is it available to others to purchase.

What if they abandon the order – who is next in line to buy it? What if their computer crashes, will they lose out?

Imagine handling this situation for thousands and thousands of people who are all scrambling for a ticket at roughly the same time.

It takes serious engineering to keep it all working, which is why you need to know if your ticketing partner has a large team of skilled engineers.

If not, how have they built a system capable of handling this kind of pressure?

That’s why Eventbrite has a team of over 100 dedicated engineers to make sure everything works smoothly for you and your fans.

Question 2: What is their uptime?

Uptime basically means who often is a website available and working, and “is often used as a measure of computer operating system reliability or stability, in that this time represents the time a computer can be left unattended without crashing,” according to Wikipedia.

This is really important to check, as reputable sites should have very high uptime (at Eventbrite our uptime is 99.99%), and any downtime obviously means time your customers can’t buy tickets, and may indicate wider performance issues that will be exposed during large on-sales.

Question 3: Do they have experience?

Often one of the best indicators of being able to handle your on-sale, is whether they’ve managed to handle ones of similar size before.

Ask them about their biggest clients and how they handled their on-sale. Check out their social feeds for around the time those tickets went on sale (you might need to do a lot of scrolling or run an advanced search) and see if there were any issues.

If they haven’t handled events of a similar size and scale as yours, then you might question is they will have the experience and infrastructure to do it well for you.

Question 4: How easy is it to buy tickets?

Despite most best-in-class ecommerce and internet retailers now allowing for guest checkouts (because forcing people to sign up for an account generally results in a lot of lost sales), many ticketing providers still insist on it.

Forcing people to create accounts even for normal ticket sales will often reduce your ticket sales by making the registration process needless long and complicated, but during an on-sale it will compound all the other pressures and contribute to bring the site down.

Question 5: Can they offer you experienced advice?

Will you get a dedicated account manager to work with you in the run-up to your on-sale? Someone who’s done this many times over, and knows how to avoid those little mistakes that could result in a bad customer experience for your event-goers?

Can they advise you on how to set up your ticketing options and tiers correctly? Will they monitor everything when you launch your sale to ensure everything goes smoothly, and be ready to work with you if anything should go wrong?

It’s the most important point of sale for you and your flagship event, so you want to make sure you feel comfortable, and fully supported by an expert in on-sales when you do go live.

In conclusion

Don’t take risks with your on-sale! If it goes wrong, it goes really wrong, and can be enormously damaging to your revenue and your brand.

A lot of ticketing and registration companies will not be suitable for handling large spikes in demand, because they won’t have the engineering team and experience to keep everything up and running smoothly.

So when choosing your partner, ask these 5 critical questions and be confident you’re going to get the service and support you need.