Bigtree Entertainment Pvt. Ltd, the owner of online tickets booking portal Bookmyshow.com, is aiming to see 50% increase in tickets sold on its platform to 150 million tickets this year.
As a part of its efforts to achieve the target, the company plans to add 200 single-screen theatres from smaller towns to its ticket booking portal.
"We have a lot of focus on user engagement which will be driven by payment services and discovery and value-added services," Marzdi Kalianiwala, head of business intelligence at the company, told Mint.
The company has already partnered with 600-800 single-screen theatres.
"15% of the supply in terms of screens would come from the next 40 towns," Kalianiwala said.
Earlier this month, China's search engine giant Baidu was reported to be in talks with Indian start-ups, including BookMyShow, to foray into the fast-growing Indian e-commerce market.
The virtual wallet rolled out by the company in August last year is currently used by 2.5 million people. The Mumbai-based firm plans to improve the features of the wallet by adding "peer-to-peer sharing for better payment options by March this year" as it sees 70% of the bookings coming from the mobile platform.
"On an average, users buy three tickets almost two to three times a month. Hence launching a wallet made sense. We think it's important to target the pre-22 age group that is 20-25% of the user base that mainly transacts in cash and the peer-to-peer lending feature would help target this audience," says Kalianiwala.
It plans to launch the new feature by August this year. In addition, the company is looking to sign up with general provision stores for the users to top up the wallet by paying cash. Users will also be able to transfer the top up amount back into their accounts.
The company has also taken another initiative where the merchants will provide "a combined ticket and coupon scheme." It is currently running the scheme with 70 merchants on a pilot basis.
"This allows users to redeem coupons based on the location of the area they are watching movies which makes the offer relevant. We are looking to roll out the initiative in two months," Kalianiwala said. Features like last-minute cancellations of movie tickets may be added to the value-added services, he added.
