How to Sell Tickets Online Using WordPress: StepbyStep Guide

How to Sell Tickets Online Using WordPress: Step-by-Step Guide

You’ve put in the work planning your event. Now it’s time to make some money! Whether it’s a concert, party, business conference, or any type of event, selling tickets is often the only way you can recoup your costs and potentially make a profit. That’s why it’s important to learn how to sell tickets online with WordPress.

Thankfully, there are some great WordPress plugins that let you sell tickets online without requiring any special knowledge.

Below, we’ll show you step-by-step how to sell tickets online with WordPress. You’ll have a great platform that’s all your own, and you won’t have to give up commissions or data to third-party middlemen like a lot of other ticketing solutions.

The easiest way to sell tickets online with WordPress

As with many tutorials on WordPress, the first step is to download a plugin.

Unfortunately, the majority of reputable plugins for selling tickets require you to either pay for a subscription or give some of your profits to the developers.

In our experience, you’re better off finding a solution with a one-time fee instead of having to pay a percentage of every sale. The reason for this is because that’s a recurring cost and it’s added on top of any credit card processing fees you need to pay.

You can consider the many paid solutions, but for this tutorial, we’ll use a free plugin that works perfectly and has some upgrades if you need more features.

How to sell tickets online with WordPress

To sell tickets online with WordPress, you can use the My Tickets plugin, which will handle all the details for you. You’ll be able to:

  • Display information about each event.
  • Sell tickets using different payment gateways like PayPal (available for free) or Stripe (requires a paid add-on).
  • Offer multiple ticket delivery options, including print-at-home, e-tickets, and box office pick up.

The only thing that we’ll assume for this tutorial is that you already have a basic WordPress site.

If you don’t, you can follow our make a website tutorial to create your basic WordPress site.

Once you have your WordPress site ready to go, come back here to learn how to sell tickets online with WordPress.

Step 1: Download and install the My Tickets plugin

To get started, install and activate the My Tickets plugin, which is available for free at WordPress.org.

If you have any questions about installing a plugin, check out our guide on the topic here.

Step 2: Configure basic settings

Now you should be able to see a tab in WordPress called My Tickets. Click on the button and go to the general Settings page.

This is a rather intuitive page for telling the system what types of tickets you would like to sell and what emails you would like to send out.

Make sure you walk through all of the settings. Some of the most important fields include the Send To and Send From email fields for confirmation emails. You can also enable where you want ticketing sales to show up. For instance, you may only want the option on pages or blog posts.

event registrations

You can also edit the confirmation emails that are sent to administrators and attendees after purchasing a ticket.

Step 3: Configure payment settings

Next, go to the Payment Settings.

payment settings - How to sell tickets online

If you’re selling tickets for money, this is where you can enable payment gateways and payment gateway information.

The free version of the plugin only allows for PayPal, but you have the option to upgrade to other payment gateways.

If you’re happy with using PayPal, check the PayPal box. Then make sure you fill in everything from the PayPal Merchant ID to the PayPal email. You can find all of these in your PayPal account. If something is missing the processing won’t work.

event registrations

Step 4: Configure the ticket settings

After saving your payment settings, go to the Ticket Settings tab.

ticket settings button

Choose which types of tickets you plan on allowing for your event. Some of the options include:

  • Printable
  • E-tickets
  • Postal mail
  • Box office pick up

This is also the area in which you’ll customize items like the image shown on tickets, shipping time, and fees for purchasing online.

Take some time walking through this and ensure that everything is configured properly before promoting your event.

ticket types

Scroll down on the page to see some more important settings.

Here you can mark when to stop sales, the total number of tickets available, and the default price of each ticket (you’ll also be able to customize these on a per-event basis).

The essential part of the process is labeling the names of the tickets and putting a price on each one.

labels and pricing

Save your settings when you’re done.

Step 5: Create tickets for an event

To create your actual tickets, you need to create a new post or page (this depends on the Enable ticketing for these post types setting from Step #2).

Scroll down to the bottom of the editor to find the My Tickets Purchase Data box.

This is where you activate ticket sales and configure the details for your event. Check off the appropriate boxes, then go over the rest of the details to ensure it’s all correct.

Make sure you set the right date and time for the event.

ticket purchase data

Click on the Update or Publish button for that page. Then, your event is live and people can purchase tickets.

How ticketing works for your visitors

To test the ticketing process, either preview or view the page on your frontend.

You’ll see that the ticketing section is shown underneath the page content.

sample page

The customer can choose the types and quantities of tickets they need.

add to cart - how to sell tickets online

The next page is the shopping cart, with fields for filling in personal information.

make payment - How to sell tickets online

The customer must select that they want an e-ticket to see the PayPal button.

purchase

After the purchase, customers get an email with their confirmation. They can also view the e-ticket if that’s their choice.

Finally, the admin gets emails and data on the backend to see how many tickets have been sold and to whom.

the eticket - how to sell tickets online

That’s all on how to sell tickets online!

Because of its low cost and flexibility, WordPress makes a great solution for selling tickets online.

Finally, if you have any questions about how to sell tickets online with WordPress, let us know in the comments below.

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Keep reading the article at ThemeIsle Blog. The article was originally written by Joe Warnimont on 2020-01-13 04:12:58.

The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.

Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the product, We may receive an affiliate commission.

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