This Filipino E-commerce Startup Launched a Ticketing Service to Transform the Philippine Events Industry

The Philippine events industry is just getting back on its feet after being stalled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the easing of mass gathering restrictions in the past year, there’s been a steady rise in the number of events being held in the country—from conferences, exhibitions, and cultural events, to back-to-back concerts from local and international artists. 

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Because of this, the country’s ticketing industry remains an ever-evolving landscape. This means constantly innovating new technologies that can adapt to consumer behavior. One bad user experience, after all, is enough to turn a customer away from your business and push them to buy tickets elsewhere. Taylor Swift fans can attest to that.

This is where Helixpay comes in. Founded in early 2022, the Filipino startup started as an e-commerce platform that offers tools that content creators and communities can utilize to maximize their online presence. This includes their own custom storefront, engagement tools, merch delivery integration, and of course, payment technology. 

These same brand-focused principles were applied in Helixpay’s event ticketing software. They provide custom websites, payment technology, digital tickets, and even on-site scanning technology as an end-to-end solution to the Philippine events industry. They have since provided ticketing services for the Warner Music Philippines client Lola Amour; economic industry forums with Business World; and the upcoming DaVinci Immersive AI Experience in BGC. With their dedication to putting events forward while providing world-class technology in the background, this startup is set to transform the Philippine events industry.

We spoke to CEO and Founder Andrew Koger to learn more about Helixpay’s ticketing platform. 

Why did you venture into the ticketing industry?

Over the course of last year, we saw a really big opportunity to expand into events in particular. First, we built e-commerce technology for content creators, and then we added event ticketing features on top of that foundation. What’s exciting about that history is that by starting with a focus on e-commerce, we’ve built a lot of features and technology that a traditional ticketing company wouldn’t focus on or wouldn’t think about. Every event can have a really nice custom website for their event. It looks like they got a fully built custom website, but it’s actually built by Helixpay. So we stay behind the scenes, and all of the focus is on the event.

If you think about some of the traditional ticketing websites, you always know that you’re on their website [and not the main attraction’s]. And what we wanted to do was really support the event organizers and focus on their event. [They] put so much effort into building these amazing events and we want all of the focus, design, and style to make sense for their particular event. 

What problem are you solving with your centralized ticketing model? How is this going to help merchants in the events industry?

You said centralized, I would say it’s the opposite. We centralize the technology side but our vision is to decentralize the experience and have each event have its own unique style. I think that’s really the value add. Our vision is to bring that e-commerce technology that everybody knows and loves with Lazada, Shopee, and Grab, bring that to the event industry, and make it easy for the event organizers to benefit from the technology. We put together the website really quickly so that the event organizer can really focus on their event and not have to worry about accepting payments, issuing tickets, and all that stuff. 

Are the QR tickets transferable? How do event organizers verify ticket authenticity in that case?

We built a lot of features to help the event organizers make their own decisions [about] how they wanna handle the experience. The tickets are digital tickets, [and] there’s a unique QR code on every single ticket. Every ticket is unique, so they’re very secure. If somebody tries to enter with a ticket that’s already been scanned, we notify the event staff that that ticket has already been used.

In terms of transferring tickets, we built different options for the events. So if an event wants tickets to not be transferrable, we can enable that. And if they do want tickets to be transferrable, we built a ticket-sharing feature. If you buy a ticket and you want to send it to your friend—on the digital ticket, there’s a button where you can send it to the friend via a secure link. And when the friend gets the ticket, they put in their name and phone number, and then we change the QR code so that that person now has the legit ticket and you no longer have access to the ticket. 

How would Helixpay fare with issues encountered by traditional ticketing platforms like website crashes and long hours in queues?

A huge advantage for us is that we really come from the technology industry. We build all of the technology to be able to handle large volumes of sales, and we’ve already done that very, very successfully. We’re building a lot of new technology also, to handle even bigger events in the future. So things like pre-registrations, we’re building that as well so that the Philippines will have a similar technology.

We’re also building different ways to track and monitor the volume of customers that are going to the storefront. Our team, when these events are launching, we have all these data science, dashboards up on our screens. So we’re able to see the traffic, the amount of people going on the storefront, the amount of ticket sales. We’re tracking all that stuff really, really carefully. 

What’s next for Helixpay?

We started out purely e-commerce, and now we actually support on-site payments also. In addition to the websites that we provide, we can also provide payment terminals for events. We’ve also launched a really cool community for the events industry. We are listing all of the cool events around the Philippines all the time, by location, and by category. This is a way for people to discover really cool events all across the country. We feature events on Helix Events that we’re not even doing the ticketing for. And all of this, we provide it completely for free. It’s our way of giving back to the events industry and supporting event organizers in the country.