Factors To Consider When Choosing A Box Office Ticketing System

Smaller organisations including schools, non- profit and community groups who sell tickets to events or performances no longer need to use a tedious manual recording method to process ticket sales or employ a ticketing service company. Box office ticketing systems are readily available at an affordable price which ensures that even the smallest of organizations can sell and record ticket sales from their website, through their own box office or via other resellers.

Whilst it's understandable that smaller organizations may think that such systems would be beyond their financial capacity or may be too difficult to implement and maintain, this is generally not the case for most organizations. Let's consider what are probably four of the main considerations.

Cost of implementation.

Companies offering box office ticketing systems may either offer the software for sale or they will offer a fully hosted system. With the former, the complete ticket and credit card processing is handled by the installed software, whilst in the latter, processing is conducted on the ticketing company's server. To offset their software development costs, suppliers of stand alone box office software may charge several thousand dollars or more for their systems. In addition, fee based annual maintenance contracts may be offered and charges levied for any software updates or upgrades.

Smaller performing arts groups and non profit organisations will possibly find the fully hosted system to be a more suitable option since there are normally no up front charges - just a fee based on all tickets sold through the system. This may be set as either a dollar per ticket charge or a percentage of the ticket price. The fee per ticket charged via this method will typically range from about $0.50 per ticket or from about 2% of the ticket price depending on the company, or what other services may be provided such as credit card processing, phone support, ticket mail out etc.

Credit card processing.

In order to sell tickets online, a payment gateway and Internet merchant account needs to be setup, which connects with the main ticketing page. Many small organisations quite understandably will not have these facilities currently established or may only have a standard merchant account and indeed may not wish to set up such facilities. However there are many gateway service providers which generally only charge a small transaction fee or maybe a percentage of the transaction amount for providing the payment gateway between the shopping cart and the merchant account. In most cases though, a set up fee will be charged to establish an account.

Another alternative is to use organisations such as PayPal which do not require a payment gateway or merchant account to be established.

And indeed is also possible to sell tickets online even without having such a payment system setup if you accept mailed in check payments. Alternatively when your customers purchase a ticket online, they can be given a voucher number which they then bring to the venue before an event where they pay in full for the tickets and exchange the voucher for actual tickets. But Of course the downside of this latter option is that people may purchase tickets and not come to the event.

Ticket printing.

Whilst specialised thermal ticket printers offer the most ideal method of printing tickets since these print individual tickets on demand from special ticket stock, the cost of such printers is unfortunately much higher than a normal LaserJet or ink-jet printer - such printers generally cost more than $US1000 - which may be beyond the budget of smaller organisations especially those who would not be printing a large number of tickets per year.

Many box office ticketing systems however may offer the ability to print tickets with a normal laser printer or ink jet printer using pre-perforated ticket blanks obtainable from printing supply shops. In this case, tickets are typically printed with four or five tickets per page. Irrespective of the printing method though, most box office ticketing systems will allow a degree of customisation in terms of text, images or logos that can be printed on the tickets.

Web page integration.

One of the following two methods are generally employed by box office ticketing systems to incorporate the ticket purchase, payment and credit card processing into the organization's website. For the first method, a few lines of computer code are normally entered within a web page template on the organization's web site which then controls the complete ticketing, payment and check out process without transferring the ticket buyer off the organization's web site (unless a payment processing system such as PayPal is being used). With the second method, a "template" type of webpage is created with the exact look and feel of the organisation's own website. The code controlling the ticket purchase and payment processing is also inserted within this template page, but in this case, the web page is located on a different server and is linked to the organisation's website by a hyperlink. Generally speaking, the ticket purchaser would not be aware they had been redirected to a different site to handle the ticket selection and payment.

Naturally, each organisation will have additional box office ticketing requirements, such as the ability to process season tickets, sales of tickets from additional outlets, sales of gift cards or FlexPasses, accepting donations at the time of ticket purchase etc. and indeed each box office ticketing system will offer a different set of specifications or features. Nevertheless, the above points encompass the most important factors that should be considered by smaller performing arts groups and non profit organizations. But none of the above considerations should normally be a problem for an organization wanting to upgrade their web and box office ticket selling capabilities and capitalize on the advantages an integrated box office system can offer.