APIs: E-COMMERCE
The show must go on Cinemas face a challenge of epic proportions as they exit from the pandemic. Eduardo Tardin, IT Manager for E-commerce with Cinemark Brasil, says APIs are emerging as the heroes of the hour Can you recall the last time you went out to see a movie… being shut in a room full of eerily-lit strangers in the dark, fumbling to turn off the phone that inevitably starts vibrating in the pocket of the coat you stuffed under the seat, and trying not to elbow the cinema-goer next to you as you wrestle with your oversized pouch of popcorn? Like many pre-pandemic experiences now denied to us, going out to watch a film is probably imbued with a certain amount of nostalgia. And it’s unlikely it will ever be the same again. But, much like the late Tony Stark’s tear-jerking observation at the close of the Avengers blockbuster trilogy: “Part of the journey is the end.” And for die-hard fans in North and South America, now slowly returning to movie theatres, that journey is being enabled by digital technology that redefines the relationship between cinema and customer.
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ThePaytechMagazine | Issue 8
As Eduardo Tardin, IT manager for e-commerce with Cinemark Brasil, part of the leading chain of picture houses in Latin America, and the third-biggest chain in the States, says: “After lockdown, in which all the movie theatres closed, we had to change our priorities and think about solutions to make the experience of going to the cinema more secure. “It accelerated our desire to create a more digital experience, focussing on maintaining a journey with less friction and more social distancing.” Cinemark had made strides in the direction of e-commerce long before coronavirus was on the radar. Way back in 1999, it became the first in the industry to offer customers the chance to buy tickets in real time, online, via a link to an affiliate website, enowshowing.com, which it had developed with Dallas tech firm Vectrix. The tickets were immediately printed at the box office for collection. It was clunky, compared to today’s mobile-first e-commerce experience, but it was a start. In 2011, Cinemark Chile started working with technology company Modyo to provide an end-to-end digital experience, including integrated payments, for customers. Every Cinemark in Latin America migrated to the platform, based on a hybrid on-premise/Amazon Web Services-hosted model, in 2018. Then, in 2019, Cinemark signed up to the first-of-its-kind social movie-ticketing platform Atom Tickets, which allows filmgoers to search for films, invite friends via their contacts, reserve seats, order concessions and check in on their way past the box office via the app. Leaning in to new technologies in this way, to improve the movie-going journey, was part of an ongoing, industry-wide attempt to counter the cannibalisation of box office sales by streaming services that offered the ultimate in convenience. And it was working. Then Contagion-for-real happened and theatres across the world were shuttered. Cinemark wasn’t alone in haemorrhaging cash. In the third quarter of 2020, it saw revenues across the United States and Latin America drop by nearly 96 per cent. At one point, it was burning through reserves at the rate of around $50million
a month, forcing it to raise new debt and revolver borrowing. But the good news is that the appetite for big screen movies hasn’t been as seriously diminished by the pandemic as many feared. Sixty per cent of consumers polled by one US survey in February said they were keen to return to movie theatres within the following three months. The restrictions imposed by the pandemic, and customers’ expectations, though, including social distancing, contactless service and the need to control and predict demand more accurately, especially given seating capacity has been dramatically reduced, have challenged Cinemark and others to come up with innovative digital solutions. Movie fans booking for its roster of Oscar-nominated films in April 2021, for instance, found features including ‘seat buffering technology’, which automatically blocks seats adjacent to a party as soon as they purchase a ticket. While mobile and online booking is encouraged, some Cinemark locations have also replaced box offices with digital kiosks to reduce contact between customers and staff. And a new grab-and-go-food ordering tool has been introduced, accessed via the Cinemark app and WhatsApp using QR code, to reduce contact with staff and avoid people hanging around in the lobby. The net result of all this has been to create more customer channels to monitor and integrate, and more tasks to manage – ever-conscious that a prevailing pandemic might force a rethink at any moment. Having an API-first strategy already in place was crucial to handling that, says Tardin. “APIs can bring a fast way to customise customer experience. They make it easy to create new products and features. Combined with an agile approach, and the right software architecture, this helps to accelerate digital transformation, bringing the possibility to work with new forms of business, like selling in marketplaces. “The strategy depends on your business context and the problem you want to solve, of course, but one of the main benefits is the possibility of enabling the development team to rapidly put things to work, and put
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