Mostly works. Do some serious cost analysis, and don’t believe any of their marketing.

What are the best aspects of this product?

Because the costs are per-ticket rather than a set rate, it's financially appealing to organizations that have fluctuations in attendance and event size. The ticketing system itself works reliably (for discussion of reports, etc., see below). The per-ticket fees are high compared to a lot of other (better) products, but if you're doing lower volume events, your overall costs will be lower. Customer service is very attentive and responsive. Unfortunately, they need to be, because the product has a LOT of quirks, bugs, and features that simply don't work.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

The front-end user database is really ugly. They'll tell you it's customizable, but what they mean is that you can add your company logo to their template. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the box office UI looks like it's from 2005. When we switched over earlier this month, I had a couple dozen patron emails within the first week complaining about it. To be fair, they all said they were able to process transactions fine; they just hated how bad it looked, and several were concerned that they'd been sent to a hacked site because of how "amateurish" the design was.

The admin interface is simply outdated, unreliable, and frequently gives error messages that are equally unreliable (i.e. sometimes the error message will say something didn't process correctly when it did... and now you've processed it twice because you tried again). Financial reports are problematic and have really bizarre restrictions (for instance, you can't filter additional donations out of package revenue reports, which can cause donations to be double-counted). Their customer service team is responsive, but there are a LOT of bugs and times when something simply doesn't work, and they always have a "workaround" ready, because they're fully aware of the problem and simply haven't fixed it. It's a lot like renting an old house.

They claim lots of functionality that simply isn't there. For instance, they try to have a built-in email marketing program, but the segmentation implementation has a lot of bugs, and there's no way to mass import emails; you have to enter them one by one in the patron editor and hope that they're actually saved. I just finished importing several hundred emails collected at an event. It took over two hours, and when I proofed the input list, about 10% of the emails simply weren't saved. The package renewal feature also has a bug that makes it unusable: if a patron refunds or exchanges one of the tickets in their package during the course of the season, Vendini decides that they're no longers a subscriber (package purchaser) and will not include them when you create the auto-renewal email. So you still have to do subscription renewals manually unless you want to lose every patron who missed a performance.

They also claim to have a website builder. I played around with it, but I can't emphasize enough just how incredibly amateurish the resulting sites looked. I recognize that not everyone has coding skills, but do yourself a favor and pay for a webhost with better templates. Like the rest of Vendini, the resulting website looked like it was designed by a college student in the late 2000s.

Vendini also suffered a serious security breach a couple of years ago. Of course, many companies experience these problems, and Vendini tried to give the impression that they were being transparent, but it was very difficult for the company I was working for at the time to receive intelligent answers regarding what we could communicate to our patrons. Vendini initially sent out a mass communications directly to our patrons that was not phrased well and caused a LOT of phone calls from panicked people. Unfortunately, Vendini didn't really let us know about this first, which meant that when the first phone calls came in, we had no idea what anyone was talking about. Basically, Vendini made us look and sound completely incompetent.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

Frankly, they need to figure out how to get their existing features working properly before they try any more expansion.

I mean, TicketAgent requires Adode Flash Player and hasn't seen any updates in the time I've been using it (starting in 2012). No one has used Flash in new development in several years. Having Flash on a computer is a rather significant security risk, and Adobe itself began recommending that people not use Flash anymore over a year ago.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

Their ticketing system works better than a whiteboard or a retail ticketing solution.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes