Eventbrite data being forwarded as "info requested"

Hi Guys  it did not work :((((

Update: The Info Requested issue has been resolved for us due to Eventbrite reverting our event back to the original checkout process. Our event is now collecting all of the data we require at for each attendee at the time of purchase. Zapier and all of our automation is working well again as well as other dependent biz processes.

@zap500 Confirmed, we are on the old version. They can switch it back if they choose.

@jamesmacwhite interesting note about the noindex… 

Takeaways from my discussions with Eventbrite on this issue:

1. Lots of organizers (they call us “creators”) are unhappy with this change for various reasons.
2. Eventbrite’s own employees (sales managers, support, etc) either didn’t understand the extent of this new product change or were entirely unaware of the affect it would have.
3. Eventbrite is actively assessing how to move forward given this unexpected level of dissatisfied users/customers

I will say that our service level has been good (we are in the commercial tier now but ran 30+ events since 2007 in the free tier) and Eventbrite has been quick to work through and resolve our issues (we also had issues with webhooks not working which is also now resolved).

Lastly I’ll say that they seem to really want this change to stick. We put a lot of pressure on and made it clear that this process will not work for our business. They did change things back for us but were unable to guarantee that it will stay that way.

I recommend that everyone continues to let Eventbrite know how they feel on this. The CEO is on LinkedIn and other places. I’d send her a connection request and drop her a short note (maybe link to this forum). 

It confirms my thoughts regarding who they care about by @ModularJack posting what commericial support really is, that depending on who you are, they offer different experiences or support. Free event organisers get thrown to the bottom and my case I opened has yet to receive any formal response.

Regardless, we are long term looking to replace Eventbrite given this situation. Even if they acknowledge they’ve made a mistake and offered to revert us (thus far we received absolutely no response from them officially), the decisions that have been made on their platform have been increasingly disruptive and do not offer value to us. Equally paying £99 per month for the same service we had previously with no cost at all, offers no addiitonal benefits to us and is equally is a big driver too, given we are Further Education college and our budgets are a consideration as well.

I won’t mention other competitors because I’m mindful this is the Zapier Community forum, not Eventbrite support forum, but there is another Eventbrite like competitor who is very interested in this situation and would not be surprised if they start to look at engaging with Eventbrite organisers who are looking to explore other options on the back of this.

Hi there,

This happens when one person orders multiple tickets and does not fill in the contact information for each ticket holder. Unfortunately, Eventbrite only requires the information for the ticket purchaser and requests the info for additional holders. Took me a while to find this on an Eventbrite support page. I’m not sure if there is any way to require the information. 

I just spoke with Eventbrite about this issue and have an update for those affected by it:

We have run this up the chain with Eventbrite management. As most here know, this “info requested” issue is part of a breaking product change that was conceived last year and went live more broadly within the last month.

It’s important to note that this Info Requested issue isn’t just a delay that can be fixed by pausing integrations. The new checkout process allows tickets to be purchased and the required information MAY NEVER BE FILLED OUT. 

For reference, Here’s the Eventbrite page that explains the change: https://www.eventbrite.com/l/order-forms-post-checkout/

Note, the page was published in November 2023 and there’s a FAQ that clearly says you cannot revert to the old checkout process.

After speaking with Eventbrite, the good news is that many of their customers are complaining about this change. I also learned that sales and support were blindsided by this change and were unaware of how it worked or how it would affect their customers.

This is a dealbreaker for our business. This checkout process change not only affects integrations, it causes huge problems for us including GDPR/CCPA compliance issues and other business-critical issues that were solved by requiring custom questions in the old product.

In the new Eventbrite Checkout Product, they actually DO COLLECT names and emails of every attendee but THEY DON’T share that information with the organizer. They use it to send email reminders to the attendee to fill out their information, which they can choose not to do! This is unacceptable for our use case as we need that data for pre-event analytics, sales, sponsorship information, compliance information, etc.

Fortunately we sell enough tickets on EB that they are listening to us and we have “commercial support”. 

What’s clear to me after discussions with Eventbrite is that this product change was not well managed or well thought out, nor was it communicated effectively internally to their staff. Not to mention the fact that no real communication around this significant breaking change was communicated to Eventbrite customers. 

All I can say to those affected is that you need to let Eventbrite know how you feel. They are a public company and customer sentiment and revenue count. Call them, email them, let them know. Clearly the management team didn’t understand the impact of this change. 

Eventbrite has offered our company the ability to go back to the old version. I’ve explained that it must be put in writing since they are obviously are having issues with customer communication.

Last, another deal breaker issue that we are negotiating on is the passing of facebook and google pixel data. Eventbrite is building their own ad platform and has recently stopped sending this data. 

Kudos to the Zapier team for their great support.

Shout out to our Commercial Team at Eventbrite as well. Though they were inexplicably blindsided by this change, they’ve been quick to respond and transparent about what’s happening. 

@jamesmacwhite Thanks for posting that email address. I will definitely send them an email.

That’s really interesting that the events are still selected at random. That would make sense because we were having registrations for a large event after November that wasn’t experiencing this issue.

I think they are probably rolling it out more frequently even if still randomly (because I’m guessing they were doing random testing before they published that article in November), which makes sense why I’m now noticing it with our two newer events.

What I also find somewhat underhand, that FAQ post being the only source of official information is deliberately being marked as noindex from search engines, so it cannot be discovered by searching key terms like “Eventbrite new checkout experience”, making others who are searching for official help/support unlikely to find it, and ironically this Zapier community thread being likely to appear on some key terms instead.

@AlisonRJ We use the New Order trigger to get the order information separately and work with it. But, since it sounds like you need it in the same Zap, I think you’ll have to do an API request.

Add another Eventbrite step, choose API Request (Beta) as the action.

Refer to the Eventbrite API documentation: https://www.eventbrite.com/platform/api#/reference/order/retrieve-order-by-id

To get the Order information, use the link they show in the documentation and put it in the URL field in Zapier: https://www.eventbriteapi.com/v3/orders/order_id/ (replace order_id with the field from the triggering event with the order Id number). Note that the ending slash is important, you get an error without it.

You shouldn’t need any of the other fields besides URL. Zapier handles the authentication for you since you’ve already connected your Eventbrite account.

Once you test, you should see the order data and you can use it later in the Zap. The field names will start with Response Data (so Response Data First Name, Response Data Last Name, etc).

From the dialogue I have had with Eventbrite support, this may provide some further insight into how this “experiment” is working. This is in reference to your previous post @ModularJack around different support related to commercial clients. I’ve omitted the support representative’s details for privacy.

Hi James,

Creators that have contracts with us haven't yet been included in the post-checkout order form experiment, so I wonder if that's what's going on with your friend. If the creator was included in the beginning, that was likely unintended and the team likely corrected that. For context, creators with contracts have connections to the Commercial Team from when they established their contracts.  

I haven't heard of any self-sign on creators being omitted from the experiment, so I'm highly doubtful that the team will consider it, but nonetheless, I have asked the product team if there would be any room for negotiation. I'm awaiting a response from them, so as soon as I hear back, I will be in touch. 

Again, I apologize for this situation, and I hope that this appeal to the team will work, but I can't guarantee it. 

Thanks for your patience and cooperation. 

I am not holding out any hope for having this turned off, but we will be moving away from Eventbrite, that is for certain.

Again, to be clear this experiment appears to be possible to run on any order created through the checkout, regardless of the event it is attached to. Commercial clients aren’t meant to be selected in this as per the above response, but it makes it even worse for organisers, adding further inconsistencies to the checkout experience and data collection.

Update:

Eventbrite Customer Success believes that we’re being affected by a bug which is randomly taking some of our orders through the new checkout process and therefore not collecting our required fields, despite the fact that our account is marked for commercial and should be exempted. 

@jamesmacwhite what they’re saying may be true. We are not technically under contract yet. We were negotiating our contract when all of this was discovered. So those under pre-existing commercial agreements may indeed have been exempted. However, even if that is the case, Eventbrite has been quite clear that they are unable to guarantee that this change won’t be forced upon us at a later date, even if we do sign a commercial agreement. 

@TheCNM we are looking at several replacements. https://lu.ma looks like an interesting candidate for an actual EB replacement. Let us know if you find others.

A couple things:

People keep calling this an “experiment” as if it’s ongoing. The experiment is already over.

As of November 2023 the decision was made to change to the new, flawed system. The blog post clearly states this, and so does their article.

We recently ran a series of experiments where we moved the order form to after payment. Through this work, we saw conversion rates nearly doubled. As a result, we’re moving all order forms including those with custom questions to after payment, with the exception of additional terms and conditions, which will still appear before payment.

More importantly, I got this response from Eventbrite support yesterday, April 18, which indicates to me that we will indeed have a universal option to switch when the custom questions are asked:

To give you transparency, the Product Improvement team is already working to give organizers an option if they want their order form for their event to be answered first by the ticket buyers before they can secure their tickets. 

I’ve made a Zap to manage the data I manually import and parse from Eventbrite every few days so I can get some data in the meantime, because as slow as Eventbrite support runs it should be a few months before we see this requested change in the interface.

Make sure to provide your feedback to contactsupport@eventbrite.com so they know this change is a disaster and needs pausing!