To keep your attendee list when you change ticketing platforms, export every buyer with their contact details, consent status and order history before you give notice, and check that your contract lets you use that data elsewhere. Then merge duplicates, load the list into the new system, and keep the old platform's order lookup working until the current event is over.
Exports get harder once an account is closed or downgraded, so the data work comes first and the announcement comes last.
Find out who holds the customer relationship
Some ticketing platforms treat buyers as your customers and give you full exports. Others treat buyers as their own account holders who happened to buy from you, and limit what you can take or how you may use it. Read the data sections of your contract and the platform's privacy terms, and ask the vendor two things in writing: can we export all buyer contact details, and can we market to those buyers outside your platform. If the answer is unclear and the list is valuable, have a lawyer read the contract.
What to export, and in what shape
- One row per order: order reference, date, event, ticket types, quantities, amounts, discount codes, refund status.
- One row per ticket where attendees were named individually, with the attendee's name and any answers to custom questions.
- Buyer name, email, phone and postal address where collected.
- Marketing consent for each buyer: whether they opted in, when, and the wording they agreed to if the platform records it.
- Unsubscribes and suppression lists from any email tool built into the platform.
- Scan or check-in records, which show who turned up as opposed to who bought.
Export every past event, not only the recent ones, and store the raw files untouched before anyone starts cleaning. Consent is the column people forget. Without it you have a list of names you may not be entitled to email, so check your privacy obligations before the first send from the new system.
One person, several years
A loyal attendee appears once per order, with small differences each time: a work email one year and a personal one the next, a changed surname, a typo. Loaded as they are, that person becomes four strangers.
Match on email first, then on name plus phone or name plus postcode, and review the uncertain matches by hand. Keep every original order linked to the merged person. When consent differs between duplicates, keep the latest explicit choice, and treat an unsubscribe as final.
Telling attendees about the new checkout
People are rightly wary of unfamiliar payment pages. Before the next on-sale, tell past buyers that tickets now come through a new checkout, show the web address it will use, and send the message from the address they already know. If buyers had accounts or stored tickets on the old platform, say plainly what happens to those.
Keep old order lookups alive for the current event
Do not switch in the middle of an event if you can avoid it. Tickets already sold have barcodes issued by the old platform, and the door needs to scan them. Either keep the old platform active until that event closes, or confirm that old barcodes can be imported and scanned by the new one, then test it with real tickets. Keep a searchable copy of past orders for staff, for the buyer who has lost their confirmation.
Changing platform is also a good moment to look at the bill. Put your per-ticket fee and volumes into our free calculator for per-ticket software costs to see the three-year total, and read what event organisers rent and what can be rebuilt. Our guide to owning your software has a section on data ownership and export. When Hiro rebuilds a system, the existing data is moved across for the customer, and the customer owns the data and the code from then on.