Between the moment someone discovers your event and the moment they scan their ticket, every step counts. Each one can win you revenue or cost you: a checkout that takes too long, an option you never offer, a resale platform that opens too early or a campaign aimed at the wrong people.
With the right features and a well-designed checkout, your ticketing turns each of these risks into a source of revenue. This article shows you how to put them to work for your next event.
Summary
1. Turn every visitor into a buyer
Your ticketing’s first job is to keep every visitor with you from interest to purchase.
A redirect to a site with different branding, a long form, a mandatory account, no one-click payment: every bit of friction leads to abandoned baskets. Your conversion rate drops.
1. A fast checkout in your own branding
On Weezevent, mobile accounts for up to 90% of ticket sales, so your checkout needs to work well on a phone.
- No account needed: you collect the buyer’s key details during or after the order through the registration form. To reduce drop-offs, ask only for what you need before payment, then collect the rest afterwards.
- One-click payment: Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal are now standard on mobile and speed up checkout.
- White-label ticketing: on your own website or on a dedicated mini-site in your event’s colours. Buyers stay on your brand from start to finish and buy with confidence.
2. A clear offer, even when it’s complex
The more your offer grows (prices, options, sessions), the more intuitive your ticketing needs to be to guide buyers through their choices:
- Sales labels: “Selling fast”, “Last tickets” or “Best deal” point buyers to what’s available and tell them when a price tier is about to end.
- Purchase rules explained: a child pass may require an adult pass, for example. If the condition isn’t met, the buyer sees the reason straight away and knows what to add.
- Filterable calendar: for events with several sessions, buyers filter by date or session type and the calendar adapts to their choice.
- Featured price: choose the price shown for each session and, for example, promote late bird prices when a session still has space.
2. Increase average order value with add-on sales
Your capacity is fixed. What each attendee spends can still grow. Options, upgrades, instalment payments and partnerships all help you increase what each attendee brings in.
1. Cross-selling, upselling and bundles
As soon as an attendee has chosen their ticket, offer to complete their order with one of these three techniques:
- Cross-selling: travel, accommodation, food, on-site experiences… Offer these services directly in your ticketing to add to the attendee’s experience.
- Upselling: offer a VIP package instead of a standard ticket, or a 3-day pass instead of a 2-day pass. If the buyer misses the offer, show it again when they confirm their basket.
- Bundles: 3 tickets for the price of 2, the 4th ticket free or prices linked to buying other tickets.
At one festival that uses our solutions, for example, attendees can add a board game pack from a partner when they buy their tickets, buy merchandise sold only through the online ticket shop or top up their cashless credit in advance.
Tip: add options that meet a real need. A locker booked online, for example, lets attendees arriving by public transport store their belongings safely.
2. Instalments, deposits and partners
Other options make spending easier or open up new revenue streams:
- Pay in instalments: for tickets, options and cashless credit. In the UK, where paying in instalments has become common, some events see up to 80% of tickets paid this way. This flexibility makes it easier for attendees to book their place.
- Deposits: accommodation can be booked with a £150 deposit, with the balance paid later.
- Partner visibility: sell space to your partners throughout the purchase journey: during checkout, on the confirmation page or in the online cashless top-up module. A nearby hotel can present its rooms right after the order. A main sponsor can appear in the cashless module, which 90% of attendees use.
These options also work for free events: the ticket costs £0, and you can still sell other options and services.
3. Keep selling after the purchase with customer accounts
Once they’ve bought a ticket, the visitor becomes an attendee. From their customer account, they prepare for their visit, add options and manage their payments. Your ticketing keeps working even after you sell out.
1. Revenue even when you’ve sold out
Expectations vary from one attendee to the next. Some festivalgoers want a quieter space between two concerts; others want to add a parking space or camping access once their plans are set. Customer accounts let you meet these needs after they buy a ticket.
Has your event sold out? Great news! Your revenue can still grow. Take a festival of 30,000 people: from their customer accounts, attendees can add a comfort option at £25 a day, with premium toilets, a shaded relaxation area and an exclusive bar. If 5% of them buy it, that’s 1,500 people, and the festival generates £37,500 a day, or £112,500 over three days, without selling a single extra ticket. If a brand sponsors the area, revenue grows further.
2. Secure tickets
A duplicated ticket, or one resold outside your ticketing, is a sale you lose.
You decide when and how the ticket appears in the customer account: at the last minute, or only in your event’s app, which also increases app downloads.
With dynamic QR codes that change every 30 seconds, a screenshot no longer gets anyone in, and unauthorised resale becomes harder.
4. Control resale to protect your revenue
Open the secondary market only after your event sells out.
Every ticket an attendee resells competes directly with yours. If your 10,000-capacity night hasn’t sold out and 10% of attendees resell their ticket, that’s 1,000 sales you lose: £50,000 at £50 a ticket, and £500,000 across 10 dates.
Once the event sells out, resale works in your favour: attendees who can no longer attend can resell their ticket safely, and you limit the black market.
Choose official resale: built into your ticketing, it runs at the original price, and you keep the new attendee’s data.
5. Steer your sales and marketing with your data
Collecting data is the first step. Using it is the next one. Gigz, Weezevent’s CRM and marketing platform, brings your ticketing data together automatically, with no exports.
- Dashboards by goal: sales, marketing, audience… Track your revenue, sales pace, and how long it takes buyers to act.
- Segments that update themselves: attendance, age, location… Combine criteria to target more precisely. Connected natively to WeezTicket, Gigz lets you use this data to isolate the 1,000 attendees who came last year and haven’t returned this year, or the 1-day pass buyers you could offer a weekend pass, and follow up by email, SMS or WhatsApp.
- Better-spent ad budgets: Google, Meta… Gigz links each sale to the campaign that generated it. You can see what works, where to focus your budget, and which audiences are most like your best buyers.
Is your ticketing ready for these new practices?
Before you start optimising your ticketing, check that your current checkout converts well. The Ticketing Index is a free 5-minute check that analyses your ticketing, checkout and sales strategies, then shows you where you’re losing sales without realising it.
For a long time, ticketing success was measured by the number of tickets sold. Today that figure tells only part of the story. Two sold-out events can generate very different revenue, depending on what each attendee spends and how many return the following year.
So before your next on-sale, ask: “How much is each of my attendees worth?”
