Selling tickets online is a booming business. You can set up a website to sell tickets for a number of events, and easily manage the tickets stock, sales, and other aspects of the business using a good ecommerce platform.
Which Ecommerce Platform Should You Use to Sell Tickets?
There are many online store building platforms available to choose from. Shopify has been consistently rated as the best ecommerce platform for many years for its ease of use, powerful features, and scalability. Eventbrite is another ecommerce platform that has been designed to promote events and sell tickets for them.
Which Should You Choose?
EventBrite
EventBrite lets you set up a website to promote events and sell tickets for the same online. You can quickly put up your website, design pages for events, and create speaker profiles. Eventbrite offers features like barcode scanning, creation of venue maps, and custom badges.
You can offer discounts for your event tickets and also set up different types of tickets on the higher plans. You can manage event registrations, ticket sales, accept group registrations, set up recurring events etc. You can easily accept and process credit card payments securely. You can import data to your Eventbrite website from other sources and also export data.
You can implement SEO for your site, connect to and advertise on social media, and send out email alerts and invitations with Eventbrite. Integrate with third-party solutions like ActiveCampaign, Aweber, MailChimp, and more for smooth and seamless business management.
EventBrite is solely focused on event management, promotions, and ticket sales for these events. You aren’t charged for free tickets but you pay a specific amount plus a percentage on each paid ticket you sell. You can only sell tickets for events you organize. You can’t resell tickets for third-party events.
Shopify
Shopify is a full-fledged ecommerce platform and it allows you to sell anything – physical products, digital products, and even tickets. It has an intuitive, easy-to-use store builder giving you access to a large set of templates that can help you set up different types of websites.
You can choose a powerful template that lets you promote current or trending events on the homepage, set up different pages for different events, etc. You can import data from other sources and share data with other applications.
You can take registrations, create different ticket types, and sell tickets. You can also provide links to speaker profile pages on the events page. Shopify is completely flexible and you can use the storefront and the templates to setup your Shopify site to sell anything, including tickets.
Shopify provides a powerful, feature-rich backend. You get a secure website with free SSL certification, full PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for secure payment processing. You can sell tickets on the Shopify site or on other channels like Facebook, eBay etc, and manage cross-channel sales from one dashboard.
Your store comes with inventory tracking and real-time updates, creation and management of customer profiles, tracking and management of sales, and more. You also have access to a set of marketing and SEO tools and resources. You can scale easily as your business expands.
Accept credit cards and debit cards or offer other payment methods like store credit. If you’re selling paper tickets, you get easy integration with a wide selection of carriers to ship them. You can also integrate tax calculations with your tickets, set up coupons, offer other types of discounts, create and offer gift cards etc.
Unlike EventBrite, you can also set up a ticket reseller website, sourcing tickets from ticket brokers, fan clubs, and event organizers themselves. Choose a niche to focus on, do some research on what sort of tickets you can legally offer as a reseller. Then set up your Shopify store to represent third-party events and sell tickets for them.
Shopify is completely flexible and extremely powerful. Use it to resell tickets or to promote, manage and sell tickets for the event you’re organizing. You can also find many apps like TazoTix and Evey Event Management to quickly configure your Shopify site for selling tickets.
EventBrite and Shopify are both good platforms when it comes to promoting events and selling tickets. EventBrite is exclusively event focused, allowing you to organize and promote your own events. With Shopify, you can also promote third-party events and sell tickets for them if you’re legally allowed to do so. Besides, Shopify is a long-established proven ecommerce platform, allowing you to expand into other areas quickly, integrate other stores, and websites, and even offers a POS app for in-person sales.
