Live Nation enables a 44,000-strong workforce to make purchases through their Shopify Plus stores with ease

First Glance

Giving 44,000 Employees Something to Cheer About

Live Nation is the world’s largest live entertainment company that has brought 40,000 shows and 100+ festivals to life via its massive network of entertainment venues, event management and ticketing operations. With their service, entertainment seekers can access thousands of concerts, festivals, sporting events and live shows right at their fingertips.

With 44,000 employees worldwide selling 500 million tickets per year, Live Nation saw an opportunity to provide even more benefits to their workforce staffing these events. By leveraging the Shopify Plus platform integrated with corporate Single Sign-On (SSO), their employees would be able to log into Shopify stores and purchase branded merchandise from Live Nation and the events they manage with their employee discount. 

Because Live Nation is a multibillion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and strict enterprise IT security, this was a complex scenario that required specialized expertise to implement. Shopify Plus recommended Sunrise Integration to Live Nation because of our team’s proven track record of solving large enterprise problems and our convenient proximity to Live Nation’s HQ in Los Angeles.

The Challenge

Integrating Single Sign-On with Multiple SaaS Applications

Live Nation has a significant footprint in ecommerce, operating hundreds of Shopify Plus stores to sell event related merchandise. As a business that constantly innovates and improves, their goal was to make it easy for their employees to make purchases directly on their Shopify Plus stores. In order to achieve this, they needed a custom integration with their SSO platform, Okta, and Shopify Plus to provide employee access and discounts for event merchandise.

Okta’s SSO service allows employees to access all their cloud applications with one sign in to avoid having to sign in on each platform separately.

Live Nation makes use of several SaaS platforms to manage employee purchases  including Shopify Plus, Okta and Workday (HR management system). Our team had to integrate all of these systems while ensuring the proper application of employee access and discounts.

The Solution

A Powerful Custom Middleware Tool for Automation 

Live Nation invited us for several in-office visits and together we engaged in discovery meetings, which were instrumental for us to carry out a technical assessment. After this process was complete, Sunrise Integration built a custom middleware tool to automate all the software they had in their technology stack. Furthermore, Live Nation’s Shopify Plus employee stores were modified to work with the different HR access requirements by event and department.

Looking to the Future

Aiming for More Growth on Shopify Plus

Thanks to the success of this custom integration of their cloud applications, Live Nation enlisted us to be their advisors for other Shopify Plus related requirements in other areas of the business. 

We also built a platform called Site Manager Central through which Live Nation manages content across 200 Live Nation Shopify Plus stores. This powerful app serves as a central CMS for assets that allows their staff to quickly deploy static store information to an artist’s Shopify Plus website in one click.