About the platform
By the time of the acquisition, the platform was used by more than 55,000 musicians, comedians, labels, managers, and filmmakers, including world-famous creators like Les Blanks, Arcade Fire, Paul McCartney, and more. The producers of Transcendent Man and One Too Many Mornings were also among the platform’s users.
Structure:
Topspin provides users with a robust functionality divided into the following tabs:
- "Catalog" - for creating direct-to-fan products and publishing them via widgets and email
- "Network" - for organizing supporters
- "Orders" - for managing order processing and transactions
- "Reports" - for tracking and analyzing KPIs
Key Features:
Topspin helps users
- Effectively manage their media files, including images, sounds, videos, etc.
- Manage and sell tickets and physical merchandise worldwide, as stand-alone items or in packages, with no privacy and tax issues.
- Create exclusive offers, such as VIP memberships or fan clubs.
- Grow your audience with online streaming video players and sharing tools for web and smartphones.
- Collect emails and data about fans' demographics, geography, interest insights, Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and more.
What made Topspin different from other direct-to-fan solutions?
- Marketing, e-commerce, asset and fan management tools united with the ability to sell and check tickets in one holistic platform.
- Streaming players compatible with different screen sizes and gadgets, such as iPhone and iPad.
- Widgets to gather fan contacts and the ability to connect with Facebook and Twitter connections, etc.
- Distributed and social commerce features allowing the creation of unique offers and the ability to place them anywhere on the web, including users’ website, social networks, blogs, and music discovery portals, with the support of WordPress, Expression Engine, Drupal, and Ning, as well as one-step integration into Virb, Goodsie, and Bandzoogle.
- Robust and accurate targeting enabling users to email supporters based on their social influence, country of residence, purchase history, and even source of acquisition.
- An easy-to-use, self-serving platform to sell tickets, along with the iPhone-based ticketing scanner (was used to sell tickets for Pixies and Eminem concerts and can be used for house parties too).
- Possibility to create membership plans and sell merchandise to limited groups.
- Login via Google, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, MySpace AOL, and many other social accounts.
- A wide selection of payment methods from PayPal and credit cards to international payment solutions such as Solo and Switch. Support for all popular currencies: USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, etc.
- No tax issues - Topspin takes care of it.
- Reporting to the OCC (Official Charts Company) in the UK and to Soundscan in the US. Compliance with COPPA, EU Safe Harbor, TrustE.
Challenge
Before releasing the platform and going public, founders wanted to make sure everything worked like a Swiss clock. For this purpose, they sought a contractor who was able to check every aspect of their platform.
Intersog was selected due to a variety of quality assurance services we offer, the expertise of our team, and our attractive track record with related projects.
Solution
Intersog’s QA team was responsible for all testing and quality assurance activities for the Topspin platform. We performed full round testing across all project stages.
Our team implemented various testing methods, including the following:
- Functional Testing: We ensured that all functions worked flawlessly and complied with all project specifications.
- Acceptance Testing: We verified that the platform met all required criteria for delivery to end users.
- Regression Testing: We made sure that updates did not affect the work of previously written code.
- …and many more.
Tests were done both manually and automatically.
Our QA team found more than 2,400 bugs and proposed relevant features that were implemented in further updates. Our services helped Topspin to build an intuitive and easy-to-use application and guarantee a top-notch user experience.
