How to Build a Ticketmaster Clone With No Code

As the world transitions to support online events, there’s a proliferate demand for platforms that connect fans with their favorite artists or creators. Products like Ticketmaster have become detrimental to the music and event industry. With the ability to sell digital tickets, artists rely on this platform more than ever.

Building a product like Ticketmaster would traditionally require a team of engineers and costs thousands of dollars. With the rise of no-code tools like Bubble, however, it’s now possible for makers of any background to build their own Ticketmaster clone - all without writing a single line of code.

Throughout this guide, we’ll uncover the process of using Bubble to build your own version of Ticketmaster.

Whether you’re looking to build a dedicated ticketing platform, or you’re just interested in utilizing some of the core features from Ticketmaster, this guide will share how to start building the underlying workflows for an MVP.

The steps to building a Ticketmaster clone with no code include:

Get Started

Before you start, you’ll need to first register your free Bubble account. Click the button below to get started, then you can follow along as we build our product together.

New to Bubble? Follow along on our introduction videos to get familiar with the basics of Bubble.

We also recommend completing our introductory lessons, which will guide you through the step-by-step process of the most common Bubble features. This will help you get a running start when building your Ticketmaster clone.

When kickstarting your project, you can choose to begin by wireframing your product design, or building the necessary fields within your database.

In this case, we’ll start by using Bubble’s visual design tool to shape the user-interface of our platform. If you’re replicating a version of Ticketmaster, you’ll need to build the following pages:

• Event creation page (overview): Used to allow admins to create the general details of an event
• Event creation page (times): A page where admins can add time slots to new events
• Home page: Used to display a list of all the available events
• Event page: Used to display the full details of an individual event
  

Configuring your database

Once you’ve mapped out the display of your product, you can focus on creating the necessary data fields to power your application. We’ll rely on these fields to connect the workflows behind your product.

Bubble’s pre-built database makes it easy to create different data types with unique fields. When building Ticketmaster as an MVP, we’ll need to create the following data type & fields:

Data type: User

Fields:

• Name
• Events attended

Data type: Event

Fields:

• Attendees - List of users. Note: Creating a field as a list based on a separate data type allows you to seamlessly integrate all of its relevant data fields without having to create additional fields
• Category
• Dates(overview)
• Description
• Featured image
• Published status - yes/mo with no default
• Ticket price
• Title
• Venue

Data type: Event-time

Fields:

• Date
• OG event
• Time

Building workflows

Now that you’ve structured both the design and database of your application, it’s time to start stitching everything together, making your app functional.

In Bubble, the main way to do this is with workflows. Each workflow happens when an event occurs (e.g. a user clicks on a button), and then runs a series of “actions” in response (e.g. “sign the user up”, “make a change to the database”, etc.)

Creating a new event

The first feature we’ll build is a function to create and publish a new event across the platform.

On the create-overview page, we’ll start by adding a variety of input elements that, allowing us to add data into our database. This first page will be used to create the initial details of an event.

Once an admin clicks the add event times button, we’ll want to trigger our first workflow.

Within this workflow, we’ll be creating a thing - a new event.

We’ll then need to start adding the relevant fields within our database. Map each of the on-page input elements with their corresponding database field.

Now that we’ve created the framework of an event, we’ll add another step to this workflow - sending an admin to the next page where they can add a list of different times that the event will be hosted.

Using a navigation event, we’ll direct the user to our create-time page, sending with it the data from the new event we just created.

When sending data to a page, it’s important to configure the content type of a landing page to match the data in which you’ve sent through your workflow.

In this instance, we’ll need to set the create-time page to be an event type.

After configuring the page type, we’ll once again use a combination of input fields to create a new event time.

After mapping out our page elements, we’ll then create a workflow when the add time button is clicked.

The purpose of this workflow will be to create a new thing - a new event time.

At this point, we’ll need to link the new event time with the original event displayed on the current page.

After creating an event time, we’ll need to display these as a full list before confirming that we’d like to publish the event.

Below our time and date input, we’ll also add a repeating group element to display a list of all the event-times added to our current event.

When adding this repeating group, we’ll need to first configure the type of content it will display - an event time.

Next, we’ll configure the data source, allowing it to display all of the event times as they’re created.

To achieve this, we’ll search for all of the event-times where the og-event equals the current page’s event.

Now you’re ready to start structuring the dynamic content that will be displayed within each grid. Simply map out the top row with the relevant content you’d like to show, then this powerful element will populate the remaining columns based on your existing data.

After adding these event times, we’re ready to now create a workflow that publishes this event to our home page.

To achieve this, we’ll create a final workflow trigger when our create event button is clicked.

Throughout this workflow, we’ll opt to make changes to a thing.

The thing we’ll want to change is the current page’s event, updating its published status to ‘yes’.

Displaying events on a home page feed

Once we’ve started adding events to our platform, we’ll need to display these on our home page.

To build this feature, we’ll utilize another repeating group element.

When configuring this repeating group, we’ll set the content type as events, then update our data source to search for all our created events.

We’ll also add an additional constraint to our data source, displaying only those events that have their published status set as ‘yes’.

This will allow us to only display events that are ready to sell tickets.

Once we’ve configured our repeating group, we’ll add our dynamic content elements within our top grid.

Filtering events by categories

When discovering new events, searching by categories can be an effective way to uncover something of interest.

By using a dropdown menu, it’s possible to filter the events on our home page by their listed categories.

After adding a dropdown element, we can create a condition on our repeating group that responds to a users selection.

Conditions are a powerful way to change the behavior of elements when certain requirements are met.

The condition we’ll set will acknowledge when our dropwdown menus value is not empty. If this condition is met, we’ll update the data source of our repeating group to search for only the events where the category value = the same as the dropdown menus value.

Sending data between pages

Within a repeating group, it’s also possible to create events inside each individual row.

This function will become useful when building navigation features across your platform. As Ticketmasters home page will only display an overview of each event (including its title, featured image, and price), you’ll want to display the full event details for each unique item on a separate page.

This additional content will need to be hosted on your dedicated event page.

To power this event, you’ll need to start by creating a workflow that redirects a user to your event page when the find tickets button is clicked.

Within this workflow, use a navigation event to send a user to another page. From here, select the destination page type to be the event page.

You’ll then need to send additional data to this page so the Bubble editor knows which specific event to display. The data you’ll choose is that of the current cells event.

Display dynamic content on an event page

Once a user has been redirected to a specific event page, you can easily pull this event data from your workflow and display the relevant content.

Once again, we’ll need to configure the page type of our destination page to match the data type that’s being sent through your workflow.

In this case, you’ll set the event page to an event property.

Next, we’ll add the dynamic content that we’d like to display for each event.

On our event page, we’ll need to add a list of the individual time slots we created. Once again, we’ll build this feature using a repeating group.

The data type of this repeating group will need to be set as an event-time, and the source will search for all event-times where the og-event equals the current pages event.

Like our home page, we’ll also add a condition to this repeating group.

This condition will be added as a way for users to filter through the available event times by a specific date.

This condition will be triggered when our date/time picker’s value is not empty. At this point, it will then search for all of the event-times where the date equals the same value from this selection element.

Accepting payments

One of the core features of Ticketmaster is the ability for users to purchase tickets to their favorite events. Using Bubble, it’s possible to harness the power of several plugins to easily support this feature.

In this guide, we’ll be using the Stripe plugin to process credit card payments through Stripe.

Note: After integrating this plugin, you’ll need to first configure your API keys within the plugin settings.

Once you’ve successfully added this plugin, we’ll create a popup element on our event page to display a summary of a users event and time selection.

Popups allow you to showcase content without redirecting the user from the current page, creating a seamless experience.

This popup will be used to display a summary of the event details before a user confirms their purchase. In order to dynamically display the correct content, we’ll configure the popups content type to be an event-time.

From here, we’ll then create a new workflow when the purchase button is clicked.

Within this workflow, we’ll create a payment event, charging the current user.

When using this event, you’ll need to input the dynamic purchase data based on the current elements event-time.

Note: As our even-time is also linked to our main event data type, we can easily pull and display its original data such as the title and ticket price.

After configuring this payment workflow, the Stripe plugin will now automatically display and process a users card payment.

Once this payment has been processed, we’ll add an additional step to this workflow, adding the current user to the list of event attendees.

We’ll also need to replicate this same step, only this time, adding the event to the current users list of attended events.

After updating both attendee fields, we’ll opt to hide our payment popup.

Finally, we’ll need to create one final workflow back on our event page. This workflow will be used to display our payment popup when the purchase ticket button is clicked.

Throughout this workflow, we’ll need to first select the option to display data. This will ensure we show the user a summary of the event and time they’ve selected.

The data we’ll want to display is the current cells event-time.

The element we’ll want to display this data on, is, of course, our payment popup.

Once this data has been sent to our popup, we can then show the element itself.

If you’d like additional guidance when building your payment processing workflow, you can watch a full tutorial in the video below.

Additional features

Once you’re familiar with creating custom data fields and displaying dynamic content, you can start getting creative with the experiences you build. Additionally, you can:

• Create support for different tiers of tickets and prices
• Create a function for users to purchase multiple tickets at once
• Add a search function, allowing users to easily discover specific events. We’ve previously covered this in more detail throughout our How To Build Wikipedia post.

Privacy & Security

Now that you have the basics of your app, don't forget to start setting some privacy rules and conditions to keep your data secure - starting with roles in the 'Privacy' section of your data tab. You can also check if you're unintentionally exposing any data with an API checker.

Launch

Hiring a developer or dev team to build this app would cost thousands, if not tens-of-thousands of dollars. As you launch and grow in users, paid plans allow you to host the app on your own custom domain, and these start as low as $25 per month. Some templates and plugins may cost more, but you can build all the functionality of Ticketmaster without any additional costs.

Templates

If you don’t want to build your Quicken Loans clone from scratch, you can purchase one of the templates made by our community members. Some similar templates include:

• Events like Eventbrite by Rapid Dev
• Conferences And Events by Rapid Dev

Start building

Bubble can help you build a Ticketmaster clone or any other product you choose! It’s never been easier to build something incredible without having to code.

Ready to join the no-code movement? Register your free account here and get started today.

If you’d like additional help when building your product, our thriving community forum is a great place to source actionable advice and resources. Any maker is also encouraged to ask questions within the community to help empower their no-code journey.