The Shopify Solution

Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT) started to use Shopify for ticketing sales at point of sale in April 2022, and then for online ticket sales when the new BMT website went live in July. Shopify is a popular ecommerce platform, it isn’t a ticketing solution, but it does encourage the development of apps that extend the existing functionality of Shopify and that tailor for specific needs. When Zak Mensah joined BMT as Co-CEO he was keen to explore the idea of using Shopify as a single ecommerce solution that would bring together ticketing, retail and F&B sales.

2021-22 was a challenging period as we began to come out of pandemic lockdowns, sites were closed and there were financial pressures that came from this. It was therefore a good time to review existing systems and costs. We also worked on a new Digital Strategy and committed to investing in fit for purpose systems that would be designed for sustainability, and to gathering and managing data as a strategic asset.

We were aware that an app would be needed if we were to successfully use Shopify for ticketing, but we felt it had the potential to be a good alternative to the systems we were using, and so posed the question “How can Shopify  achieve what is needed?”. To answer this question Shopify consultants Keir Whitaker and Craig Cooper conducted key stakeholder interviews with individuals and teams that looked at current systems, issues and desired future capabilities and outputs. I attended all the meetings and so saw firsthand the confusion, complexity and issues that came with systems we were using, including the workarounds that people had designed to get things done, the time it took to do things, and the difficulties in extracting timely, accurate data.

The resulting report stated confidently that Shopify could handle the operational needs of the business with the addition of a custom application designed to manage and check ticket availability. Everything purchased from BMT – tickets, food & beverage, retail items, etc., could exist within Shopify, ruling out the need to work with several different systems and suppliers. ShopifyPlus and Shopify POS Pro would create a single, simple system which was easy to manage, maintain, update and build upon. Importantly, it has the analytics and live view to track and report on data instantly.

Shopify is extremely healthy, in 2022 there were 3.8 million active Shopify stores, it had a gross merchandise volume of $197.2 billion and it possessed 10% of the global ecommerce platform market. It also creates confidence by the way it actively invests in developments and improvements. It offered a more dynamic and sustainable solution for BMT than third party suppliers that focus on a narrow customer base and move at a slow pace.

Words that resonated with me from the report were that we should keep it simple as needless complexity benefits no one. But could it be as simple as stated? We had an app to develop for ticketing and with several venues, admission charges and multiple types of events, and it also had to do Gift Aid – it was vital income, and we couldn’t risk getting it wrong.

Spoiler alert: we’ve done it! Shopify is now BMT’s unified solution for commerce, and successfully used for ticketing. The work of IT Manager Simon Wong and team and the support of relevant staff across all sites has been invaluable. We’ve had to learn together and sometimes it has been a steep learning curve. It has been invaluable having a Shopify developer on hand, not just to develop but to listen, fix and improve quickly. In a forthcoming post Shopify developer Simon Davies, We Are Mode Ltd, will be writing about the custom Shopify app he created, the problems encountered, what we’ve learned and what is coming next.

Linda Spurdle, Birmingham Museums Trust.