Choosing a ticketing system at the box office
These days, smaller organizations that sell tickets to their events no longer need to use a paper-and-pencil method of recording ticket sales or the services of a major ticketing company to sell their tickets. There are now a number of ticketing software systems available that provide an inexpensive way to manage ticket sales not only through your local box office, but also through website sales and sales through agents or others. resellers.
cost
Generally speaking, box office ticketing system providers either sell the software or operate a fully hosted system where the main ticketing and payment processors are installed on the providers’ servers. To recover development costs, software system vendors may charge several thousand dollars for their system, but typically this would be a one-time charge plus perhaps a maintenance contract or additional costs for software upgrades. However, for small and medium-sized organizations, the fully hosted system may be a more suitable option, as in this case the service providers charge only on the basis of each ticket sold through the system, which may be a dollar per ticket charge or a percentage of the ticket price. Fees under this system can range from around $0.50 per ticket or around 2% on the ticket price upwards, depending on what additional services are provided, such as handling credit card payments or ticket posting.
processing payment
In order to sell tickets online. an organization must have a payment gateway and internet merchant account setup, which links to the main ticketing page. In a large number of cases, of course, a small organization will not have these facilities in place and may not want to establish such facilities. However, there are a large number of gateway service providers that charge a small transaction fee or perhaps a percentage of the transaction amount for providing the gateway service between the shopping cart and merchant account. the financial institution. There are also other organizations such as PayPal that can be used quite easily and do not require you to set up a payment gateway or merchant account.
Of course, it is also possible to sell tickets online even without having such a payment system setup. In this case, when your customers purchase a ticket online, they will be given a coupon number which they then take to the venue before an event and after paying in full for the tickets they ordered, the coupon will be exchanged for actual tickets.
ticket printing
While a specialized thermal ticket printer, such as those made by Boca Systems, is the ideal situation, as they print individual tickets from specialty ticket stock, the cost of these printers is unfortunately much higher than a LaserJet printer. or regular inkjet; $1,000 may be out of the budget for small organizations that do not print a large number of tickets per year. Fortunately, some of the ticketing systems at the box office will allow tickets to be printed with a regular LaserJet or inkjet printer using readily available letter-size ticket punched blanks that typically print four or five tickets per page. . However, regardless of which system is used, most ticketing systems allow for some customization in terms of what can be printed on the tickets, such as logos or images, etc.
Website Integration
Most box office ticketing systems use one of two methods to integrate ticket selection and payment processing into a website. First, a few lines of code can be inserted into a web page on the organization’s existing website, and this code will handle the entire ticketing and payment process without leaving the organization’s website (unless use a payment processor like PayPal). The other method is that a web page is created with the exact look and feel of the organization’s websites and similarly the code is also inserted inside this template page, but in this case the actual web page is located on a different server and is linked to the organization’s website by a hyperlink. In most cases, the user would not realize that they had been transferred to a different site to handle seat selection and payment.
Of course, each organization also has additional requirements, such as the ability to handle season tickets, sell tickets at additional outlets, sell gift cards or flex passes, accept donations, etc. and each box office ticketing system will have somewhat different features included. However, the four considerations above are likely to encompass the top concerns for any organization contemplating a new ticketing system. But as explained above, none of these should be an obstacle for any organization wishing to handle their own online ticketing and take advantage of the additional advantages that operating their own system can provide rather than using a ticketing service organization. .
