subject: Box Office Ticket Software For Smaller Venues [print this page] Selling tickets, building customer records, printing out and mailing out tickets can be a labor intensive task for a large number of small organizations and particularly onerous if the venue depends on only a few volunteers. So it's not surprising that many venue operators decide to contract out this task to specialist ticketing service companies. Nevertheless for a lot of organizations, outsourcing is not an ideal solution because it has a number of negative aspects including :
* the cost of the service, that may frequently be particularly high in relation to the ticket price
* it may not be possible to change the service charge levied on online ticket purchases
* inadequate or no access to the customer database
* ticket revenue will probably be held until once the event has been held
* events will be displayed on the ticketing service company's web site together with scores of additional events
These days however there are an ever-increasing number of box office ticketing systems available that even the smallest users including colleges , community organisations and non-profit groups can use to handle both their box office ticketing and web based ticketing. And many venue operators most likely are not aware that not just is the cost of such systems extremely affordable , but generally speaking, the ticketing systems are straightforward to set up, straight forward to operate and do not normally necessitate additional hardware or software to be invested in .
With the fee per ticket pricing model adopted by some ticketing software providers, there is no software to acquire and generally there will be no establishment fees or additional ongoing charges . With this particular pricing model, generally speaking, the only charge is a fee based on the value of all tickets sold through the system which may either be a percentage of the ticket price or fixed dollar amount per ticket. And fees may be low as 2% of the ticket price or $.50 per ticket, depending on the volume of tickets which might be sold.
In fact it could be said that the only essential considerations for small organisations is that they have an existing web site, (assuming they want to sell tickets online), possess some means of accepting payment into their bank account, and have a suitable ticket printer .
Setting up online ticketing on an existing website however is normally relatively simple . The ticketing software company can generally create a webpage that looks precisely like a nominated page on your current website, and the ticket selection and credit card processing will be conducted on this page. All the box office software as well as payment processing is hosted by the box office software company.
With payment processing, there are normally two main alternatives . With the first alternative, the ticketing company will process all the payments and receive the ticket sales revenue into their bank account. When the event has been held, or on a specified schedule, the company will then transmit the total ticket income minus credit card processing fees, and any system usage fees to the venue operator. In the second case, the venue operator establishes their own payment gateway and merchant account, in which case all ticket sales revenue is received by the venue operator as soon as a ticket has been bought. The ticketing software company then invoices the usage fees based on the total revenue received.
With ticket printing , whilst the most ideal way is to use a specialised thermal ticket printer, unfortunately these can be quite costly. However many ticketing software companies offer the ability for printing tickets with a regular laser or inkjet printer, in which case tickets are printed on a normal letter or A4 sized piece of paper. Pre-perforated paper can be purchased from specialized paper suppliers or perforated to order from a print shop which will allow the printing of 4 or 5 tear off tickets per sheet.
Of course any new piece of software might take some time to learn, but in the long run, most smaller venue operators will likely be thankful for the savings in time and trouble that a fully featured box office software system can offer to sell tickets online.
