Selling tickets online – basic steps

Many venue operators would like the ability to sell tickets to their events online via their own website, but may be uncertain of how to start. Let’s take a look at what is required .

To start with , you will either need to purchase a ticket sales software system, or more appropriately for smaller venues, sign up with a hosted ticketing provider . If you prefer to purchase ticketing software outright, the advantage is you will not normally be faced with ongoing charges, except perhaps for some maintenance fees or possibly extra costs from time to time for any upgrades and product enhancemants or bug fixes .  With a hosted system though , the ticketing software company 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 based on either the value of all tickets sold through the system , the number of tickets sold or perhaps a monthly charge . So to some extent, the choice of system to sell tickets online will depend on how many tickets you expect to sell, the price of the tickets, and the cost of any maintenance fees or upgrade fees for purchased software.

There are two sides to any ticketing program . Firstly the administration side, where you typically log in to the system with a unique user name and password. Here is where you will set up your theatre, venue or stadium , your programs, your events, times and dates of events and also your pricing schedules . 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 season 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 specific page on your website or else the software provider will create a template page which looks precisely the same as your existing Web site pages. in this case, the ticket selection and payment processing will be conducted on a different on a different web address but will be linked by a “buy tickets here” button or similar. Effectively however a customer would not be aware that they had been transferred to a different URL. This page will list all your events, which may be grouped by time , venue or address or program name. The ticket purchaser will then click on the name of event which will bring them to the seat selection page.   After selecting the required tickets , the customer then proceeds to the payment page where they enter their credit card details.
 
To receive payment for tickets purchased you generally have two main choices. Firstly the ticketing software provider may handle the complete payment side and deposit all ticket income into a holding account. In this case, the ticket income is normally only transferred to the venue operator’s account after 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 second alternative is to establish 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 will avoid 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 posted directly to them, printing  their tickets at home, or receiving an an exchange voucher by email which they take to the box office prior to the event and exchange for actual tickets.  If you are offering a print-at-home option though , it is important to remember that there is nothing stopping 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 solving this problem is to print all tickets 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 downloaded data file or will require a live connection to the Internet and the ticketing software database .  The other alternative is to post all tickets. But in this case an appropriate ticket printer will be requited to print the tickets . Special 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 that is stopping even the smallest of venues from selling tickets online since ticketing software systems are increasingly affordable, easy to set up and easy to use.