Ticketor

Ticketor is an online ticketing system for event organizers, venues and tour operators who sell reserved-seat and general-admission tickets from their own page. It is a configured platform rather than a blank builder: you set up events, seating, prices and sales windows, and Ticketor supplies the checkout, the e-tickets and the scanning app. The company describes its offer as a "full featured, unlimited ticketing solution for all type of events, plus standard marketing and much more." Its pricing is built on transaction fees, with a plan that carries no monthly fee, which is the first thing a small organizer will want to know.

What you build and how

The thing you build is an event with a ticket inventory behind it. Ticketor handles both assigned-seat events and general admission, and its Standard plan includes unlimited venues, events, tickets and seating charts. Seating charts are central to the setup guides: you place prices on the chart and can block seats. Blocked seats cannot be bought by regular users until you unblock them, while administrators and sales agents with the "Sell blocked seats" permission still can. On the chart they show faded out to admins and agents but unavailable to the public. The guides say blocking serves several purposes: temporarily making seats unavailable, reserving them for a potential buyer, or blocking seats and ordering physical tickets for them.

Pricing is modeled with two terms the setup pages use throughout the event, season, package and ticket screens. A price level is the main price assigned to seats or areas of the seating chart, so 3 areas with 3 prices means 3 price levels. A price variation is an optional price under a level that shares the same seats, such as senior, child, early bird, group pricing, or a ticket with an add-on. You can add as many variations as you need. Editing a price level affects all unsold tickets assigned to it, and to change only some seats you select them and use Update Tickets. The tours page adds that the platform supports multiple price variations per seat, so adult, kids, senior and early-bird prices can sit on one seat.

Tickets come in two forms. A ticket designer lets you create customized tickets or badges, and you can use physical tickets or e-tickets. Every one carries a barcode and a QR code, so you can admit people by scanning with a smartphone or a professional barcode scanner. The company says its gate control app supports "exit for re-entry," so you do not have to stamp attendees who step out and come back. The company also offers a free event QR code generator, a separate tool for pointing a code at an event page, registration link, RSVP page or donation page. It needs no signup, adds no watermark, runs in your browser, and does not upload logos you add to Ticketor's server. You can download the result as a PNG, SVG or JPG for flyers, posters, emails and signs.

Around the ticket sale sit the extras the plan list names: marketing tools and a mailing list, donation collection and donor management, and a gift shop, online store and food, drink or concession sales. On the Premium plan the company adds advanced marketing and SEO, advanced fraud protection, a website builder with a content management system, and white-label and custom URL support. The reseller option goes further. The company calls it the Reseller plan, also known as the Platform plan, for businesses that want a white-label, branded platform similar to Ticketor and offer ticketing to other organizations. It lets you own a branded website where event organizers sign up and get a ticketing website of their own.

For the buyer, checkout is an account flow. An organizer's ticket page hosted on Ticketor invites buyers to sign in or sign up so they can manage and print their tickets at any time, with an emailed verification code and a Google sign-in option. The sign-up form asks for a cell phone number because the organizer may need to text or call about the event or the account, and lets the buyer choose a newsletter preference.

The evidence from the pages

Ticketor's pricing is stated on its home page and its tours page. The Standard plan is listed at "$0.00 / mo" with a fee of 2.90% plus $0.69 per item. The home page says there is no flat fee per ticket, that you receive the sales money directly and as tickets sell, and that there is "No long-term contract and no cancellation fee." It adds that fees are credited when you refund tickets or cancel events, and that you set the buyer's fee, "from zero to as high as you want," so you can pass the fee to buyers or absorb it.

The Premium plan is listed at $54.95 a month, with a lower figure beside it. The home page shows $37.95 a month beside it and the tours page shows $43.95, so the discounted rate depends on which page and term you look at. The fee falls to 2.50% plus $0.49, $0.29 or $0.00 per item across the 3 columns, which the page labels Monthly, Annual and 3-Year. In the company's words, you get "lower transaction fee by committing to a longer plan," and the home page says rates run "as low as 2.5% + $0.00 per transaction." High-volume merchants are told to contact the company for custom pricing, and it claims it can "beat any competitor's rates." Because the plan table and the fees are laid out in columns, confirm the exact pairing in the plan table before you commit to a term.

Who it suits

Ticketor fits organizers who sell reserved seats or tiered tickets and want one platform for pricing, scanning and the gate. A theater, a venue running many events, or a tour operator can run unlimited events on the free-of-monthly-fee plan and move to Premium when the lower per-item fee outweighs the $54.95 list price. The reseller option is for a company that wants to host ticketing for other organizations.

The caveats are plain. Standard's fee of 2.90% plus $0.69 per item is higher than Premium's, so a busy organizer should price out Premium. The model is built around events, not recurring appointment slots. Seating and pricing have their own vocabulary of levels, variations and blocking.