As we start planning for spring and summer events, we want to be sure you know that Event Espresso is your Event Ticketing System for WordPress. Whether you are hosting Art Classes, Car Shows, Conferences, Quilting Retreats, or any other event, Event Espresso makes it simple to sell tickets to each of these events – or all of them at the same time – right from your WordPress website.
With Event Espresso you can: (more…)
Let me tell you a story about a small town quilting company that’s losing over $21,000 from Eventbrite fees and charges, annually.
Modern Quilt Company (not the real name), and we’ll call it MQC for short…started out about ten years ago as a small family business in a small rural town. Employment was scarce in that small town, and local enterprise abandoned the city many years ago. Buildings were left abandoned, and the local infrastructure was crumbling, while many of the residents had to travel long distances to work, or eventually left the area altogether to find employment elsewhere.
The founder of MQC’s father, Greg, commuted an hour and a half to work each way as a mechanic at the local newspaper. He worked long hours and many night shifts to support his wife (Shauna) and his seven children. In 2008, when he lost a hefty portion of his retirement savings in the market crash and at a time when the newspaper industry was laying off people every month, his son’s James and Sammy concocted an idea to start a business that could help their parents towards retirement. (more…)
Eventbrite fees and charges are out of control, or they have too much control! Event Espresso beats Eventbrite by keeping you in full control of your money because you get paid directly and instantly, customer data stays with you, style and company branding is in your control.
Are you selling tickets to your next event? Are you willing to give away 3.5% of your ticket value + $1.59 in Eventbrite fees for every ticket sold? Eventbrite pricing means that you have to fork over a percentage of every ticket you sell when you use their ticketing service. With Event Espresso you are in control of your money because your events are hosted on your website. That means no monthly fees, no registration fees, or ticketing commission fees. And because with Event Espresso you use your own merchant account (e.g. Stripe or PayPal) so you get paid instantly. (more…)
We are pleased to announce that our Printable Tickets and Ticket Scanning add-ons are now available for Event Espresso 4 (EE4). These add-on platforms bring event managers and organizers even more autonomy and power to setup their own registration system.
We recently heard about an unfortunate event that affected a group organizing a Christian writing workshop. The group hired an outside company to handle its online event registration, only passing along the payments to the organizers once the event was finished. Unfortunately, the registration company’s checks began to bounce, eventually leaving the workshop group short $65,000 in registration fees.
At Event Espresso we were disheartened to hear that one company took advantage of a group that placed a great deal of trust in it. At the same time, this is a good opportunity for us to reiterate the flexibility and security of the Event Espresso model, and assure our customers that their confidence in us is well placed. Here are three reasons Event Espresso customers can rest easy, knowing that they have made the right choice to trust us with their online event ticketing and registration.
In short, there is one more reason Event Espresso is the premier event registration and ticketing platform around: trust. With our dedication to constant improvement, and best-in-class support, we’re helping you make the world a little better—one event at a time.
To see some of the great things our customers are saying about Event Espresso, visit our Testimonials and Reviews page.
I want to commend you on a fabulous product which is just the right price for a small non-profit. People are happy with the registration process, as are we! ...Thank you SO much for a great product.
Sandra Forero Bush
World Trade Center Tacoma
At Event Espresso we’re never content with what we’ve already accomplished with online event registration for WordPress. We’re always looking to make improvements so our customers can sell tickets online. There are so many significant developments coming soon to Event Espresso that we wanted to highlight some of the great changes that are on the way.
The Ticket Selector in Event Espresso is being completely redesigned. we’ll show you the full redesign later, but just one powerful function will be the ability to control single ticket options.
Part of that redesign includes the power to control the Ticket Quantity, #Uses per Ticket, Minimum Number of Tickets and Maximum Number of Tickets.
WordPress event managers will be able to set how many of each specific type of ticket is available. You may have only one type of ticket, or many different ticket options for attendees. You will be able to offer a limited number of, say, VIP tickets so you can give a certain number of attendees a special experience. You could also limit the number of promotional tickets that are available for sale, and so on. There are a lot of powerful things you can do with setting quantity limits to your online ticket sales.
Pro Tip: We’ll address this again later, but setting quantity limits for individual online tickets will be one form of setting seating limits for your event or venue in Event Espresso.
When you combine Number of Uses per Ticket with our mobile ticketing apps and ticketing add-on, you really become a professional event manager; you also make online event registration a breeze for your attendees. With the Number of Uses per Ticket, you can sell tickets to attendees that can be used any number of times. For example, if want to sell a ticket that will let people return to the same event twice (or more) then you can do that. You could configure your ticket sales so that attendees can reuse one ticket for all the events in your event series instead of having to print off and bring new tickets each time. This also allows you to let attendees use their ticket as a badge. On the other hand, if you want limit how many times someone can go through the food line, then you can do that too!
Pro Tip: What if you want offer unlimited access to your events or unlimited number of uses during a certain time period? Well, you’ll be able to do that too!
It’s obvious that attendees have to purchase at least one ticket to attend your event. But what if you wanted attendees to purchase more than one ticket? You can sell tickets online with WordPress and require that attendees purchase more than one ticket at a time. For example, if you want to sell sponsorships to your event with the requirement that the sponsors purchase more than one ticket for their company, now you can set it up that way. What if you want to sell a family pack of tickets online and offer a discount for purchasing multiple tickets? Well, you can do that too.
Pro Tip: What if you wanted to sell tickets online with tiered pricing? You can now configure the price of each ticket to be different based on the minimum number of tickets they have to purchase. The more tickets you require, the bigger the discount. That’s awesome!
What about the opposite situation, when you knew people would want to attend your event multiple times, but the goal of your organization was to engage with more unique individuals? Now you can specify that someone can only purchase a single (or any maximum you want) number of tickets per transaction. The Maximum Number of Tickets Allowed to Purchase also means you can specify the price of each ticket for a quantity range of tickets (e.g., purchase 5-10 tickets and the price of the ticket is $xx each; purchase 10-20 tickets and the price per ticket is only $x).
Pro Tip: Want to make it less convenient for ticket scalpers to hoard tickets? You can at least get in their way with Maximum Number of Tickets Allowed.
We love to see cool websites running Event Espresso. Every once in a while we come across a real nice organization focused on helping others. Other times we get an opportunity to work on websites for churches, charities and other types of non-profit organizations. Recently I had the pleasure of working with Scott and Charlie at the Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People in the UK.
Using Event Espresso to Support Their Mission
Charlie reached out to us to help with adding more functionality to their event listings and registration pages. He also wanted to accept single and multiple event registrations, and display events that do not accept registration, on their website. For the registration pages, he needed a way to display another set of buttons on the registration pages. One button needed to link to the registration form, and the other needed to add the event to the shopping cart. Since we’re the event registration and ticketing experts, we were glad to support a great cause.
Registration Page with Two Buttons
A few Customizations
In addition to helping with setting up their event listings page, I showed them how to create two buttons using a little bit of HTML and a built-in Event Espresso shortcode to get something like this (more on this below).
Updating to the Latest Version
They were several versions behind on updates, so I also helped get their version of Event Espresso and the addons updated. They had made a few customizations to the Event Espresso template files, based on the older version of the plugin. So I backed up their entire website and installed it on my local server so I could test the updates before deploying the updates to the live website and risk breaking things.
In order to see the exact changes they had made to the original template files. I used a program called Diffmerge, to compare the modified templates, in the uploads directory, to the original version of the templates that came with the currently installed version (not the current version) of Event Espresso.
After the Update
The update actually went pretty smooth, and I didn’t lose their customizations or any data. The only thing left to do was make a few tweaks to the shopping cart CSS, and add some HTML and a shortcode, so they can display a couple of nice buttons on the registration pages. The first button is an anchor link to the registration form below the event description and the second button links to the Multiple Event Registration page allowing attendees to buy multiple types of tickets at once.
Overall everyone involved is very happy with how the system turned out. It also made us feel good to help out an organization that plays such a great role in the short lives of the children, and their families, that the Rainbows Hospice for Children and Young People provide. So please take a moment to like them on Facebook, or send them a friendly Tweet, and say thanks for the good things they do for these children and their families.
If you are a non-profit organization, you may qualify for a discount on your future purchase of Event Espresso by filling out our Non-profit Application form.
About Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People
Courtesy of their Facebook Fan Page:
https://www.facebook.com/rainbowsfanpage
Children with a short life to live have alot of living to do Rainbows Hospice for children and young People make every minute special
Rainbows Hospice for Children & Young People, based in Loughborough, Leicestershire is the children’s hospice for the East Midlands. Children and young people with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions come to the hospice for specialist respite stays, symptom management, palliative and end-of-life care. Their families, too, are supported and helped by Rainbows on their difficult journey. At Rainbows the emphasis is on enriching life and making each minute of each short life count. Each child is treated as an individual and helped by the skilled, experienced team to get the most from life and enjoy it to the full.
Providing Care
Rainbows aims to provide 1:1 care wherever possible on a needs led basis for all children and young people who use our service. We are a nurse-led unit with support from a team of doctors with expertise in children’s palliative and end of life care and symptom management. A minimum of 3 qualified nurses (two of whom are children’s nurses) are on duty at all times, and competency based care is delivered by a highly skilled multidisciplinary team.
The Care Team
The Care Team are supported by our Family Support Team who visit families at home or in the community as well as offering support when the children and young people are staying at Rainbows. Their work extends throughout the child’s or young person’s life and beyond into bereavement support as necessary.
Philosophy
Our philosophy is that children are children first and foremost – they are not ‘little adults’. We offer a holistic approach to all our work and aim to involve children and young people and their families at every step of the way.
Visit their website at www.rainbows.co.uk for further details.
Event Espresso is a powerful event management and registration system that is perfect for many different types of events, including everything from Yoga classes to hockey games. However, I bet you didn’t know it has been used as a haunted house ticketing system?
Why go through the hassle of using a third-party ticketing system when you can manage your ticket sales right from your website?
Haunted houses are fun and booming, but many haunted houses (like these two based locally in Salt Lake City) waste your money by using a third-party online ticketing system. These third-party ticketing systems tack on a “Ticket Surcharge” or “Booking Fee” for each ticket purchased, in addition to transaction fees that are incurred by the company hosting the haunted house company. Not good!
Event Espresso gives you many tools, right at your fingertips, to handle your haunted house ticketing. Right out of the box, you have access to a ticketing and payment system through your favorite merchant gateway. Many haunted houses will change their schedules, running more shows/admissions the closer you get to Halloween. With the Calendar add-on, you can let your visitors know what nights your haunted house will be open and let them purchase tickets for the evening they want to attend.
Compatible with most responsive themes
More info:
To make your life easier creating events, you can use the many ticket and pricing options available to you. Our system enables event managers to create a variety of ticket options to accommodate the maximum number of attendees and collect the right fees.
Ticket Selector
An unlimited number of tickets can be configured with the following options:
Use the Promotions add-on for Event Espresso 4 to add powerful and flexible promotional pricing features to your website. You can create discount codes and promotions that can be applied when registering for an event. The promotions feature gives you the ability to send your audience a discount code, or receive an automatic discount that reduces the price of a ticket(s)/registration(s).
As a haunted house owner, use the promotions feature to allow you to:
Here is a brief screencast demonstration for the Promotions & Discount Codes in Event Espresso 4:
More info:
Once your attendees are registered, you can create custom tickets that can be scanned at the door by our mobile ticketing apps for Android and iOS to grant admission.
Event Espresso’s customizable and printable tickets can make your organization look smart, capable, entertaining, and prepared. In addition to the Advanced Printable Tickets where you can change the default ticket, Customized Printable Tickets from Event Espresso will let you create custom ticket designs for each event separately. You can have one ticket design for one event and another ticket design for another event, plus maintain the default ticket type all at the same time.
You can customize the default look of your ticket for all events, with custom:
Your ticket can be any shape or size or color and contain almost any information you want to match your brand.
Our event app allows you to transform your Android or Apple mobile device into an onsite attendee management tool. The event app gives event managers the ability to manage check-ins at the door of your events. You can even use the event app to scan tickets (optional upgrade), check attendees in/out of events, view attendee/registration and event info.
The Event Espresso 4 event app allows you to transform your Android or Apple device into an onsite attendee management tool. It also lets you quickly check-in attendees and see information about your events and attendees. Built-in ticket scanning capabilities allow you to scan tickets (optional upgrade) at your classes, meetings, conventions, concerts, and everything in between.
Requirements:
Benefits of using the Event Espresso 4 Event Apps include:
Best of all we do not charge you per-ticket fees – a hot button issue for many haunted house managers! If you have not yet chosen an online ticket software for your haunted house ticketing, know that our yearly subscription based pricing can potentially generate additional revenue for you.
Unlike other event and attraction ticketing companies, who hold on to your ticket sales money until after the party, Event Espresso allows you to choose the payment processor, so the money goes straight to you as soon as tickets are sold – just like a product sale. That gives you the money you need to cover bills, pay for venue rental, and even earn interest.
And if your current haunted house ticketing system doesn’t provide the tools mentioned throughout this post, please contact us at your convenience, or post to the pre-sales forums and we’ll do our best to help explain how it can work for you.
Written by Seth Shoultes
University of Utah Hockey
Our friends at the University of Utah Hockey needed a way to sell season tickets to the students and local hockey fans. We added the Multi Event Registration addon to their site and helped them customize their Event Espresso installation so they can sell season tickets.
However, they also needed a way to sell the tickets with volume discounts after a certain amount of tickets were added to the customer’s shopping cart. With the new Volume Discounts add-on, a discount is applied to the total amount of the tickets. Volume Discounts allows the team to sell tickets at a discounted rate which works perfectly for people that purchase a season pass to all the games up front. Volume Discounts is currently in beta and will be made available as part of our premium licenses soon, but for now you can download and play with the beta version.
We recommend using categories, so you can assign a volume discount to a specific category, but you can also assign a volume discount to all categories. For their site, we set the discount threshold at $70. Once the total value of the price in the cart hits $70, the total for all tickets is discounted 50%.
To take a look at final result, visit the University of Utah Hockey’s season tickets page. If you are a license holder for Event Espresso, you can learn more about how we set up their season tickets, download the beta version of the plugin for free (for a limited time) and learn about the custom function we added to their site to automatically add 1 seat to all items in the cart, by taking a look at the new Volume Discounts doc here.