There are several ways to collect payments and sell tickets online, depending on the degree of complexity of your event, the number of events you may offer in a given year, and the amount of money you want to pay to not only secure, but to “professionalize” your payment systems.
Simple and Cheap
The simplest and easiest way to collect payments from your website is to install a Paypal button –
- Go to Paypal and create a button for the amount you want to collect.
- Copy the embed code or the link that paypal gives you and add that to your website.
This is the simplest and easiest solution if you are only collecting for one or two items like membership fees or scheduling appointments for a regular service.
Simple. Professional – Pay Per Ticket Sold
Eventbrite is a full-service event and ticket solution. They will host and online event page for you, and offer payment processing services. You do not have t use their payment processing solutions in order to use eventbrite. And you do not have to post EVERY event your organization has onto Eventbrite. If you only have one or two big events per year, and you wish to delegate all the platforming responibilites, Eventbrite is a good solution to consider.
The beauty of using Eventbrite is that your event has the potential for exposure to more people – when people go to eventbrite and look for listings in their area, your event will pop up. The downside of using Eventbrite is that, using the Pro version which gives the flexibility needed to run a larger event, each ticket sold will cost patrons an extra $1. (e.g. on a 100 person event, this amounts to $100).
If you are only sponsoring one or two big events per year, and do not have the time or money to invest in more complex payment systems for yourself, this is definitely the solution. It is fast, simple, and effective. There is ample tracking, and with the pro version you have all the flexibility you need to have multiple ticket types and pricing points, as well as selling tickets ahead of time or at the door. You also have far less risk of your server or payment processor “going down” for any reason right at the crucial ticket-paying moments, as Eventbrite is a very robust, well-supported service.
If you want to get more sophisticated and collect payments for multiple products and services that all need their unique descriptions and/or amounts, there are many more solutions.
WooCommerce
The basic Woocommerce plugin is free, and can be used for simple payment systems. When a buyer clicks the button to pay, you can send them off-platform to Paypal. Meaning that you can collect customer details within woocommerce and then send them over to Paypal to complete the transaction.
The downside of relying on something like woo commerce to transact on your website is that you want to make sure you have a reliable website and server because you don’t want your site to go down at a critical moment. Also, if you are not going to send customers off-site for the payment function, you are going to have to upgrade your SSL to something beyond the Free version.
Woo commerce also takes a bit of time and effort to set up. It is not something you would want to implement and rely on over a weekend. But it is a good long term solution.
Events Manager
The beauty of using an events manager is that you can not only schedule events, you can display calendars. There are a number of free event management plugins. The free plugins will let you submit events and post them on your site in various formats. Some will also let you produce event sliders that link back to the event posting.
If you want to sell tickets to an event, however, you are better off going with a Pro version of the event manager because it offers you the ability to set multiple ticket prices, discount coupons, and keep better track of ticket sales. (est $80/yr)
If you are going to sell physical goods (t-shirts) as well as tickets to events, an integrated woo commerce solution is the best way to go because otherwise you are always switching from one platform to another.
Events Calendar is a plugin that integrates well with Woo Commerce, and there is a free version available that will do the trick if the event traffic is not too high. Woo Commerce also has a bookings plugin (paid) that can offer more functionality for booking events.
WP Forms
If your business involves getting people to fill out forms and add information, you can integrate payment gateways though WPForms . $199/year will give you the functionality to download and sort all forms, add people to an autoresponder email list, and collect payments.
Who collects data and forms? Membership sites. Some courses. Applications sometimes involve a fee.
Additional considerations – you may wish to upgrade your SSL certificate from a free to paid in order to have the security to collect and store your customers data.
Email: Setting up an autoresponder is an important consideration, and should be done right at the start, as you are signing up your first members and/or selling your first set of tickets. This allows you to keep in touch via newletters or special event announcements down the road. Mailchimp offers a free version for the first 2500 subscribers, and this easily integrates with WooCommerce