Whether you're hosting a one-off music festival or a weekly club night, offering ticket sales via your website is a proven way to boost attendence.
In fact, in this day and age, online ticket sales is something that your customers will expect and demand -- from their point of view, buying online is far more convenient than having to track down a brick-and-mortar box office.
If you're looking to sell tickets online, Ticket Tailor is one of the premier ticketing solutions, with thousands of event organisers already using our easy-to-use service. A quick snapshot of benefits of using Ticket Tailor include:
- No per-ticket fees -- we charge monthly, making it more affordable for you
- Customisable tickets and ticket page
- Integrate either PayPal or Stripe to receive your funds
- Exclusive access to your customer data
Ready to jump in? Good!
Today, we take a detailed look at how to set up and start selling tickets from your website, using Ticket Tailor.
Getting Started
To start, you'll need to sign up for the Ticket Tailor service. It's completely free to do so, and this gives you complete access to everything on the back-end before you commit to becoming a paid member. This is great as it allows you to play around with the different options to get a feel for the service before spending a penny -- of course, to actually sell tickets, you will have to become a paid-up member.
Creating Your First Event
After signing up, you'll be taken to the dashboard. The first thing we need to do is to create an event. To do this, click on the Events tab at the top, then click Add a new event.
This will open up a new page, where you can begin to start adding details of your event.
Start by adding the name, location and time of the event. If you click on Advanced options you'll be able to add a start and end time and date for your event. You can also add some extra information about your event in the Description field. I've created an example event, which you can see in the screenshot below.
When you've done this, you can add a new type of ticket to be sold on your website. Click Add a new ticket type. This will open a lightbox, where you can begin to set up details of your tickets. Add a name for your ticket, and if you want, a description.
Use the Face value field to set a price for this ticket type. You can add a booking fee -- note, this is for you, not for us -- which can cover your associated administrative costs.
You can also set the number of tickets available in the Quantity field, as well as the maximum tickets per order, if you want to prevent one customer buying up all the tickets.
When you're happy, click Save ticket.
You can add as many types of tickets as you want -- for example VIP tickets -- so repeat this step as you please.
When you're happy, it's time to move on to the next part of the adding an event process. You can set your default currency, as well as a transaction fee -- if you'd prefer customers incur a fee on a transaction basis, rather than a per-ticket basis.
You can also add an image for your event, set your order confirmation -- the message a customer receives after a successful ticket purchase -- and click the check box under Send SMS tickets if you want your customers to be texted their ticket. Note: you will require SMS credits to do this.
When you're happy, click to Save event.
From here, you'll be taken to an event summary, providing details for your event, a graph showing the number of each ticket type sold, and the URL of your event box office.
Click on the icon next to the URL and you can see what your box office looks like, with everything in the default settings.
Here's what mine looks like:
It looks good, but probably doesn't match your website's colour scheme. Let's make some changes.
Customisation
The good news is, there are a number of customisation options, so you can get your box office just right.
Click on the Box office setup tab at the top. You'll be presented with a number of options, but let's start by hitting the Customisation button at the top.
From here, you can adjust the colours for your background and text, as well as adjusting your font. You can even add a logo for your event.
When you've made adjustments and want to see what your new box office looks like, hit Save.
This will bring a new gold box up, which you can click to preview the changes you made.
Now, I'm not very creative at all! I'm sure you can do a much better job at customising your box office, but the screenshot below shows you how different you can make your box office look, in just a few minutes.
Payment Integration
When you're happy with your event details and box office design, the next step to sell tickets online is to add a payment processor. With Ticket Tailor, you're given a choice between Stripe and PayPal. These are the two big players in the industry, and both are a great payment solution, so whichever one you choose will be fine. You can read more about them here: Collecting ticket payments with Stripe or PayPal.
When you've decided which payment processor to use, click on the Box office setup tab again, then go to Payment options. You'll be greeted with the choice between Stripe and PayPal, so click to connect your Ticket Tailor account up to your chosen processor.
Let's branch off here, so I can show you how to integrate each service.
Stripe
If you want to use Stripe as your payment processor, click to Connect a Stripe account.
You'll see the Stripe signup form. If you're new to Stripe, it's time to fill it in. Work your way through the questions, giving as much detail as possible. If you're yet to officially register your business, don't worry: the company number and VAT fields are optional.
If you already have a Stripe account, this process is much quicker. Simply click to sign in from the top right-hand corner of the page. You'll be asked to log in, and then taken to an authorisation page. Click the big blue button to connect your Stripe account with Ticket Tailor.
If done successfully, you'll then see a lightbox, confirming you've connected your Stripe account, and giving you some options for future events. Click Save payment system and you're done!
PayPal
To use PayPal, click to Connect a PayPal account. A lightbox will pop up, asking for your PayPal email address. If you don't have a PayPal account, click the link to register with PayPal. If you do have one, simply input the email address your account is registered under and click Save payment system.
That's it with PayPal! Easy, right?
Integrate with Your Website
An optional step to sell tickets online is to integrate your box office with your website. To do this, click the Box office setup tab, then hit Website integration.
From here, Ticket Tailor will automatically generate some code that can be directly inserted into your website to embed your ticket checkout.
To get the HTML code, simply click on the blue text, then copy and paste the code. You can paste this directly onto the page you want to display your box office, or, if you want it displayed on every page, into your sidebar.
If you use WordPress, creating a sidebar widget is simple. From your WordPress dashboard, simply go to Appearance > Widgets and use the drag and drop interface to drag a Text widget from your available widgets into your sidebar box. Simply paste your HTML code into the text widget, and hit save.
For those of you preferring a WordPress plugin for the job, Ticket Tailor has recently released its own dedicated plugin. Go to Plugins > Add New and search for 'Ticket Tailor'. You should find it at the top of the search results, then click Install Now.
Finally, click to Get the WordPress code, and paste the shortcode anywhere on your site. The plugin will then use the shortcode to create your box office.
Wrapping Up
And that's it! You can now sell your event tickets online, right from your website -- expect a nice increase in ticket sales!
This tutorial has been quite thorough to allow us to help people of all skill levels, but in reality it shouldn't take you very long at all to integrate your box office into your site. For most people, your online ticket checkout will be up and running in minutes.
Not bad at all!
If you have any questions or need help with anything, let us know in the comments section below and we'll do our best to help as quickly as possible! Thanks.
