May 24th, 2010
How to offer event tickets for sale online
Many venue owners would like to sell tickets to their events online via their own website, but may be uncertain of how to start. Here’s a brief overview of what is required .
Firstly , you will either need to purchase a box-office ticketing software system, or more appropriately for smaller venues, sign up with a hosted ticketing provider . If you prefer to purchase ticketing software outright, the principal advantage is you won’t normaly be billed with recurring charges, except perhaps for some maintenance fees or maybe extra costs from time to time for any upgrades and enhancements . With a hosted system on the other hand , the software provider hosts the ticketing program on their own servers so you normally won’t have any significant upfront costs and any upgrades , bug fixes or enhancements will be routinely installed at no additional expense . However in this case the ticketing software provider will charge for the service based on either the value of all tickets sold , the number of tickets sold or perhaps a monthly charge . So to some extent, the choice of which type of ticketing system to use to sell tickets online will depend on how many 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 . Firstly the administration side, where you will normally log in to the system with a 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 also have many other options available within the administration side of the program for setting up events, offering discounts or gift cards, setting up subscription tickets, setting up your customer database and much more .
The other side of the ticketing program is the web side . Setting up the Web user interface will either require entering some code into a particular page on your website or else the software provider will create a template page which looks exactly like your existing Web site pages. in this case, the ticket selection and payment processing will be carried out on a different on a different web address but will be linked by a “buy now” button or similar. Effectively however a customer would not be aware that they had been redirected to a different URL. This page will display all your events, which may be grouped by time , location or program name. A customer will then click on the name of event for which they require tickets which will bring them to the seat selection page. After selecting the seats they require , the customer presses a payment button to take them to the payment page where they enter their credit card details.
To receive payment for tickets sold, you generally have two main choices. Firstly the ticketing software provider may handle the payments entirely and receive all payments into a holding account. In this case, the ticket revenue is normally only transferred to the venue operator’s account after the event has taken place or perhaps on a monthly basis. A credit card procewssing charge will be deducted from the amount transferred.
The second alternative is to set up your own payment gateway and merchant account, which will allow all ticket revenue will be deposited into the account of the venue operator as soon as any ticket is sold. The ticketing software provider will normally bill usage fees for the system on a monthly basis in this case. Another option is to set up an account with PayPal which avoids the need to set up a payment gateway/merchant account.
After a successful transaction online , the customer may be given the option of either having the tickets mailed to them, printing their tickets at home, or receiving an an exchange voucher by email which they take to the box office before the event and exchange for actual tickets. With print at home PDF tickets , it is important to remember that there is nothing to prevent anyone from copying the PDF ticket This can be a problem for non resserved 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 problem is to have all tickets printed with barcodes, but of course this means that some form of bar code scanning device is required at the entrance to the venue. Scanners will require connection to a PC and will either confirm valid transactions from a previously downloaded data file or will require a live connection to the Internet and the ticketing software database . The other alternative is to mail out all tickets. But in this case an appropriate ticket printer will be required . Although specialist thermal ticket printers which are the ideal way of printing box office tickets, can be quite expensive, many ticketing systems will fortunately allow tickets to be printed by a standard laser or inkjet printer.
Basically however, these days there is very little impediment for even the smallest of schools, or non proft organizations from offering tickets to their events online since ticketing software systems are increasingly affordable, easy to set up and easy to use.
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