BookMyShow & its Ticket to Higher Success Rates: A Case Study

The Stage

24 years ago in South Africa the seed of an idea was planted, a dream was shared. Inception happened and, 22 years on BookMyShow is one of the largest Ticketing Platforms! This journey has been nothing short of Box Office hit in itself and the three Musketeers would love to do it all over again.

Oscar Worthy

Lights, Camera, Action!

Bookmyshow, the leading online ticketing platform for movies, events, and sports in India, has become synonymous with seamless entertainment experiences.

The Unicorn’s journey is nothing short of a Tarantino movie, with the Three Musketeers(Ashish Hemrajani, Parikshit Dar, and Rajesh Balpande) planting the seed for a big tree on their holiday in South Africa. BookMyShow was born, and Cinema Experience got a new life, its own “Zindagi na Milegi dobara.”

BookMyShow fought the rough seas in the midst of the dotcom bubble, and in 2007 came the big break. Network 18 invested, an intern came up with the name BookMyShow.com, and the rest is history. Bigtree Entertainment (The Parent) launched India’s first ticketing aggregator - BookMyShow in August 2007, grew taller, and is now one of the biggest ticketing portals in the country.

BookMyShow is the Baahubali of Online Ticketing

How BookMyShow Handles Traffic Bursts

The Pandemic hit the entertainment industry hard, it was the first to shut down and the last to get back on its feet. But it left behind a valuable lesson -Do More With Less.

Handle more traffic, with as little infra as possible.
-BookMyShow

BookMyShow doesn’t get heavy traffic every day. It is distributed through the week with differing loads where weekends have the heaviest traffic and more so at specific times of the day.

This means BMS must be able to handle burst traffic. How do you handle traffic which resembles Tatkal bookings?

While BookMyShow introduced “BlockBuster Days”, where they simulate heavy traffic for a popular movie, prep the system for the same and see how it behaves, it’s also imperative that their Payments Infrastructure was Baahubali enough to handle the burst in traffic, provide a seamless Checkout Experience and maintain consistently high Success Rates.

The lack of which would frustrate customers, lead to an increase in refund queries, and add a disproportionate load to their customer care team.

Enter Juspay

Juspay was founded with the vision of making payments simpler and seamless. Along the way, we evolved from a single cell organism to multiple complex forms, solving progressively larger challenges along the way.

The Juspay UPI edge

UPI took India by storm, and as with most online businesses, UPI formed the majority BMS’ overall volumes. To handle traffic Bursts, BMS migrated to Juspay powered Axis bank Stack.

The Juspay-Axis UPI Stack is the culmination of our learnings from building BHIM and UPI stacks for CRED and Amazon.
The Success Rates hit record Box Office

The Juspay-Axis stack reduced technical failures and powered blockbuster Success Rates, handling traffic peaks with finesse. Moreover, the stack also ensured a much more stable refund system, which immediately lowered BMS’ customer care inquiries.

Juspay further improved the payments infrastructure for BMS by introducing Juspay powered Yes bank UPI stack and handling routing between the two and some more UPI PGs. This reduced BMS’s dependence on single stacks and further improved payment performance.

The end?

The Payments Orchestra

There’s a part 2 to this movie! And, it’s a brilliant sequel. There are no retakes in Payments - A broken Payments experience can leave a sour taste in customers’ mouth. Juspay plays “the Payments Director” for BMS, bolstering BMS’ payments infrastructure with a state of the art Orchestration Layer, routing transactions between different Payment Gateways.

Owing to great results, BMS and Juspay set out to make it a trilogy.

The BlockBuster Payments Experience

The BMS and Juspay relationship evolved further towards enhancing Customer experience by improving user journeys. BMS uses a custom in-app flow with Google pay which reduces the number of steps required to complete the payment. Lightning fast payments with fewer steps, and no app switching meant a seamless checkout experience with lower drop offs and drastically better Success Rates.

BookMyShow X Juspay - More than a Trilogy

Today, BMS sells more than 15 million tickets every month and have partnerships with over 6,000 cinemas, 600 venues, and 4,000 event organisers. The growth story of BMS is ripe with perseverance, innovation, and a commitment to making entertainment accessible to all - no less than a blockbuster in itself. And, Juspay is proud to be working with BMS to solve Payments and in a very BMS way, do it with less.

Before you go

As you build, refine and grow your business, it is imperative to have a payments partner who understands the complexities and challenges that come in the journey and can help you navigate the same.

Juspay is the payments platform of choice for India’s leading companies, who partner with us right from their early days. We provide a future-proof end-to-end infrastructure connecting directly to 300+ Payment Gateways, Networks like Visa, Mastercard, and NPCI, and your customers’ favorite payment methods. Juspay’s innovative products have transformed the payments experience, turning payments into a growth lever for your business.

We’re part of India’s growth story, one which makes Payments seamless for her startup ecosystem and her billion citizens. Are you ready? Explore how Juspay can hyper-charge your growth story.

Checkout Ralstan Vaz’s post as he walks us through how BookMyShow weaved together a culture of doing more with less.