TicketWave HQ is the platform UK Web Marketing is wholly owned by. Same company number (17143167), same Pudsey registered office, same architectural disciplines. This case study covers the platform itself — what it does, why it exists, and how it integrates with the websites I build for UK SMBs.

The single-sentence positioning

The H1 reads: “Ticketing that disappears behind your brand.”

That’s not metaphor. The platform serves the booking widget on a custom domain (book.yourpractice.co.uk, order.yourrestaurant.com), with your colours, your fonts, your terms of service. Customers never see a TicketWave brand. The infrastructure is white-label first; the brand is anti-marketplace by design.

Three modules, one platform

Most ticketing/booking/ordering competitors specialise:

Eventbrite owns events ticketing but has nothing for restaurant orders
OpenTable owns bookings but has nothing for ticketed events
Deliveroo owns food orders but has nothing for either of the above
Fresha / Booksy own salon bookings but charge monthly subscriptions and own the customer relationship

TicketWave is one platform with three modules, sold separately:

Ticketed events — single events, recurring series, multi-event accounts, free tickets at zero commission
Service bookings — staff calendars, services with durations and prices, deposits, automated SMS reminders, opening-hours rules
Curated takeaway / ordering — menus with modifiers, kitchen tickets, courier integration, no marketplace commission to a third party

A salon takes bookings and sells a class series. A restaurant takes table bookings and orders for delivery. The platform handles both without forcing the venue to run two SaaS subscriptions.

The commission ladder

No monthly fee on any module. Pricing is commission-only, on a sliding scale:

4% — entry rate, applies until monthly transaction volume crosses the first threshold
2.5% — mid-tier as volume grows
1.5% — high-volume floor for established venues

Free tickets carry zero commission. Charity events and free RSVPs cost the organiser nothing.

The contrast against Fresha (~£25–60/month per practitioner) and Booksy (similar tiered pricing) is sharp: a busy salon hits a fixed subscription cost regardless of revenue, whereas a TicketWave salon pays in proportion to what it earns and never owes anything in a quiet month.

The technical posture

Next.js on Vercel London (lhr1). Modern isolation triad (COEP: credentialless, COOP, CORP) — the kind of headers that suggest the team is taking cross-origin security seriously, not just shipping defaults.

5-locale i18n at the platform layer. en, es, pt, el, fr. Locale negotiation via cookie + header. The five-locale set hints at the markets the platform is built for — Mediterranean tourism, Ibiza / Barcelona / Lisbon / Athens / Marseille. Every venue page can serve the correct language by default.

Stripe Connect for vendor payouts. Each venue connects its own Stripe account at onboarding. Settlement is 2–3 working days direct to the venue’s bank — no platform holding-account, no escrow week. Promoter / affiliate tracking is built into the same flow: an affiliate link signs a Stripe Connect commission split automatically at checkout.

Offline QR scanning. Door staff at a busy event can scan tickets without an internet connection — the scanner caches the guest list locally and reconciles when reconnected. Real-world ops detail that matters at the door.

Custom-domain routing. Each venue gets its own subdomain or apex (DNS configured by the venue or by UK Web Marketing on their behalf). The booking flow looks like it lives on the venue’s own infrastructure. Trust signal compounds.

How this connects to the UK Web Marketing tier ladder

The TicketWave HQ modules are not bundled into any UK Web Marketing tier. They’re sold direct by TicketWave HQ at TicketWave’s published rates. UK Web Marketing builds the website; TicketWave HQ builds the booking / ordering / ticketing layer; the customer signs two subscriptions because the work is genuinely separate.

What UK Web Marketing handles is the integration. The four /integrations/{bookings,ordering,stock,ticketing} spoke pages on the agency site walk three embedding patterns:

API + Astro-rendered HTML — best for SEO; used for ordering and stock catalogues. Server-fetches data from TicketWave, renders as native HTML, looks indistinguishable from hand-coded content.
Web component widget — used for bookings, where the calendar UI needs to be interactive.
Sandboxed iframe — used for ticketing, where the UI iterates fastest and isolation is cheap insurance.

In all three the customer never leaves the venue’s domain.

What this signals about UK Web Marketing

Being owned by a platform parent isn’t filler trivia — it’s a pedigree signal. A web design agency that also runs the booking platform its clients integrate with knows what the integration surface should look like, because it owns both sides. The two-company model exists because the work splits cleanly along ownership lines: the agency owns the marketing site, the platform owns the transactional layer. Both bill direct.

That structural honesty is the case study point. If you want the website plus the booking module: I’ll build the site, TicketWave will run the bookings, the bills come from two companies, and the maths is transparent. WhatsApp me — same person on both sides.