Everything But The Weed

Approved by:
Linda Maze, a Wedding photography Gainesville FL in Gainesville Florida

Many venue operators 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 you need to consider .

Firstly , you will either need to buy a ticket sales software system, or more advantageously for smaller venues, sign up with a hosted ticketing service . If you choose to purchase ticketing software outright, the advantage is you will not normally be faced with ongoing charges, except perhaps for some maintenance fees or maybe extra costs from time to time for any upgrades and product enhancemants or bug fixes .  With a hosted system on the other hand , the ticketing software company hosts the box office software 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 with this option the ticketing software provider will charge for the service based on either the value of all tickets sold through the system , the number of tickets sold or perhaps will charge a monthly fee . 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 the cost of any maintenance fees or upgrade fees 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. Here is 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 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 interface will either require entering some code into a particular page on your website or else the ticketing software company will create a template page which looks exactly the same as your existing Web site pages. in this case, the ticketing and payment will be carried out on a different URL from your website 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 display 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 seats they require , 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 box office software providor may handle the payments entirely and receive all payments 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 set up your own payment gateway and merchant account, in which case all ticket revenue will be available to 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 completing the online transaction , the customer may be given the option of either having the tickets posted directly to them, printing  their tickets at home, or receiving an e-mail exchange voucher which they take to the box office prior to 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 general admission 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 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 software 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 way of printing box office tickets, can be quite expensive, many ticket sales software 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 selling tickets online since ticketing software systems are increasingly affordable, easy to set up and easy to use.