Box Office Ticketing Systems for Smaller Organizations
– Main Considerations

For even the smallest organizations, it is no longer necessary to use the pen and paper method to record ticket sales, or to employ a major ticket service company to sell tickets to your events.  There’s an ever-increasing number of box office ticketing systems available which provide an affordable way of managing your box office ticketing, online sales and if required, sales via agents or other resellers..

But undoubtedly, many small organisations consider that the cost of such systems may be well outside their financial means or that they would be too difficult to implement and maintain.  Fortunately however this is no longer the case.

So let's take a look at four of the major considerations which are possibly regarded as a stumbling block was most small organisations

Cost

Basically speaking, you can either purchase a box office ticketing system outright as software to be installed on your computer or you can choose to work with a ticketing company that provides a fully hosted system where the main ticketing and processing is installed on the provider’s servers. With purchased ticketing systems, in order to recover the development costs, sellers of such systems may need to charge several thousand dollars for their systems, but apart from maybe an annual maintenance contract or charges for upgrades and improvements, this would be a one-off cost.

But for smaller organisations, the fully hosted system may be a more appropriate option since here the box office ticketing company only charges for tickets sold through the system.  This may either be a dollar per ticket charge or a percentage of the ticket price.  And the fees under this system typically vary from around $0.50 per ticket or about 2% of the ticket price upwards depending on what additional services may be provided, the complexity of the software, and the handling of credit card payments or additional service features such as call centres or mailing out of tickets.

Payment processing

To sell tickets online, it's necessary to set up a payment gateway and Internet merchant account which links to the main ticketing pages. Most organisations will probably have a merchant account set up already so all that's required is to sign up with a payment gateway provider.  There are a large number of gateway service providers which generally charge a small transaction fee or maybe a percentage of the transaction amount for providing the gateway service between the shopping cart and the financial institutions merchant account.

Alternatively you could consider organisations such as PayPal which do not require any payment gateway or merchant account to be established.
It is also possible to sell tickets online without even setting up a payment gateway and merchant account.  In this case when your customers purchase a ticket online they will normally be given a voucher number which they then bring it to the venue before an event, and after making full payment, they will be issued with the actual tickets.

Ticket printing

Whilst specialist thermal ticket printers such as those manufactured by Boca Systems are certainly the most ideal method of printing tickets since these type of printers issue individual tickets from special thermal ticket stock, the cost of such printers unfortunately is considerably higher than a standard laser or ink jet printer. Generally speaking, small organisations with only a relatively low number of ticket sales, would find it difficult to justify the cost of such printers.  But fortunately many box office ticketing systems will allow tickets to be printed with a normal laser or inkjet printer where you can either use a standard letter-size or A4 sheet of paper or paper which has been pre-perforated to produce four or five tickets per page. Irrespective of which type of ticket printer is used however, most box office ticketing systems will allow tickets to be fully customised in thousands of logos, graphics and additional lines of text.

Website integration

Generally speaking, there are two ways of integrating the ticket selection and payment processing procedure into an existing Web site.  Firstly, a few lines of code are inserted into a webpage on the venue operator’s website and will handle the complete ticket selection and payment processing without leaving the venue operator’s website (unless a payment processor such as PayPal is used). The other method is where a special webpage is created with the exact look and feel of the venue operator’s own website, but in this case the actual webpage is located on a different server and is linked to the venue operator’s website by a hyperlink. In most situations, the user would not be aware that they had been transferred to a different web site for ticket selection and payment processing.

Naturally every organisation also has additional requirements such as season tickets, additional ticket outlets, the ability to sell gift cards and FlexPasses, to accept donations etc. And every box office ticketing system will have a somewhat different set of features included in the system.  Nevertheless the above four points probably cover the major considerations for any organisation contemlating a new box office ticketing system.  Realistically however none of these considerations should be a stumbling block for organisations who wish to move to online ticketing and capture the additional advantage that operating their own system can provide.