subject: How to Sell Event Tickets from Your Website [print this page] Many organizations or venue owners would like the ability to sell tickets to their performances online through their own website, but may be uncertain of the right way to start. Here's a brief overview of what you need to consider .
To start with , you will either need to purchase a ticket sales software system, or more advantageously for smaller venues, sign up with a hosted ticketing provider . In the event you opt to purchase ticketing software outright, the principal advantage is you will not normally be faced with ongoing charges, excepting perhaps for some maintenance charges or possibly extra costs from time to time for any upgrades and enhancements . With a hosted system though , the software provider hosts the ticketing program on their own servers so you normally won't have any significant upfront costs and any upgrades or enhancements will be routinely installed at no additional expense . However in this case the ticketing system provider will charge for the service provided determined by either the value of all tickets sold , the number of tickets sold or maybe a monthly charge . So to some extent, the choice of which type of ticketing system to use to sell tickets over the internet will depend on the number of tickets you expect to sell, the price of the tickets, and in relation to ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs for purchased software.
There are two sides to any ticket sales software . First of all the administration side, where you typically log in to the system with an unique user name and password. It is here where you will set up your theatre, venue or stadium , your programs, your events, times and dates of events and also your ticket prices . Depending on the ticketing system , you'll have multiple options within the administration side of the program for setting up events, offering discounts or gift cards, setting up subscription tickets, setting up your patron database and much more .
The other side of the ticketing program is the web interface . Setting up the Web user interface will either require entering some code into a specific page on your internet site or alternatively the software provider will develop a template page which looks precisely the same as your existing Web site pages. in this instance, the ticketing and payment will be conducted on a different URL from your website but will be connected by a "buy tickets here" button or similar. Effectively however a patron would not be aware that they had been redirected to a different URL. This page will list all your events or performances, which may be grouped together by date and time , venue or address or program name. A customer will then click on the name of event which will take them to the seat selection page. After selecting the seats they require , the customer presses a payment button to take them to the transaction page where they record their credit card details.
To receive payment for tickets sold , you generally have two major options. First of all the ticketing software provider may handle the payments entirely and deposit all ticket income into a holding account. In this instance, the ticket revenue is normally only transferred to the venue operator's account once the event has taken place or perhaps on a monthly basis. A charge for processing the credit card payments will be deducted from the amount transferred.
The next alternative is to establish your own payment gateway and merchant account, which will allow all ticket revenue will be available to the venue operator as soon as any ticket is sold. The ticketing software provider will usually bill usage fees for the system on a monthly basis in this case. You can generally also use PayPal which avoids the need to set up a payment gateway/merchant account.
After a successful transaction online , the customer may be given the choice of either having the tickets mailed to them, printing PDF tickets at home, or receiving an e-mail exchange voucher which they take to the box office before the event and switch for actual tickets. With print at home PDF tickets , it is important to keep in mind that there is nothing to prevent anyone from replicating the PDF ticket. This can be a problem for non reserved seating events. With reserved seating events, it is not so much of a problem since obviously two people cannot sit in the same seat. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to print all tickets with barcodes, but obviously this means that some form of bar code scanning device is required at the entrance to the venue. Bar code scanners will need to be connected to a computer and will either confirm valid transactions from a previously downloaded data file or will require a live connection to the Internet and the ticketing database . The other alternative is to mail out all tickets. But in this case an appropriate ticket printer will be requited to print the tickets . Although specialist thermal ticket printers which are the ideal method of printing box office tickets, usually are quite expensive, many ticketing systems will luckily allow tickets to be printed by a standard laser or inkjet printer.
Fundamentally however, these days there is very little that is stopping even the smallest of venues from offering tickets to their events online since ticketing software systems are increasingly affordable, uncomplicated to set up and easy to use.
