Ticket sales
Ticket sales cover everything between the moment someone decides to come and the moment a valid ticket is checked at your entrance.
Ticket sales is the whole process of offering places for an event, taking payment for them and handing over a valid ticket in return. It covers what happens on a website, what happens at a counter and what happens at the entrance. A sale is only finished once the buyer holds something that can be checked at the door.
What online ticket sales actually involve
When you sell tickets online you are doing four things at once: publishing what is on offer, holding a place while someone pays, collecting the money, and sending back proof of purchase. Most organisers only think about the first and the third, and are then surprised by the other two.
The holding step is the one that causes arguments. Two people can reach the last place at the same time, and a system that does not reserve a place during checkout will happily sell it twice. Online ticket sales are as much about counting as they are about payment.
Where it tends to go wrong
The usual failure is not technical. It is that the sales live in more than one place: a form for the online buyers, a notebook behind the bar, a stack of paper for the committee. Three lists means three counts, and the count you trust at the door is a guess.
The second failure is cost. A platform that takes a slice of every ticket sold turns a good evening into a smaller one, and the slice is largest exactly when you sell most. Many organisers only work that out after their first busy season.
How to sell tickets online: getting started
To sell tickets online you need four things: an event with a date or with time slots, a ticket type with a price, a payment provider that pays the money into your own account, and a place where people can find your sales page. That is all, and a website of your own is not even on the list.
That place can be a link in your newsletter or on social media, a QR code on a poster, or a ticket shop embedded in your own website. You can embed it as a button that links to your sales page, or with the shop placed inside a page of your site; checkout then opens in a full window, so your visitor's payment app opens just as it should.
How Passavo handles ticket sales
You sell tickets for an event from one place. The online shop and the counter sell from the same time slots, so a place sold at the desk is gone online as well, and a full slot sells nowhere. Anyone with the right permission can follow the sales on their own phone.
The cost is a flat amount per month with no charge per ticket sold, so a sell-out earns you more rather than costing you more. The money moves through your own payment account, which means the takings never sit with us on their way to you.
Also searched for as
- sell tickets online
- online ticket sales
- selling admission
- taking bookings
Common questions
Can we still take cash as well as online payments?
Yes. Cash taken at a counter or at the entrance is rung up on the till and appears in the same overview as the online orders, so your takings stay correct. With time slots, it also counts against the same places.
Do we need a website before we can sell tickets?
No. Every sale gets its own page with its own link, which you can share in a newsletter or a group. If you do have a website, you can put the shop inside it later.
How do we sell tickets online?
Create an event and a ticket type with a price, connect your own payment provider and share the link to your sales page. With Passavo you can start for free: on the free plan each event sells up to 100 paid tickets, and free events are unlimited.
Can we embed the ticket shop on our own website?
Yes. You put a button or a link on your site, or you embed the shop in one of your pages. The guide explains both step by step, with the code to copy.