This past summer, our staff at Upshot Commerce attended a lot of seminars and conferences about the world of ecommerce. One thing that is very clear from this summer: marketing and selling event tickets is certainly changing.
Once marketing seminars and conferences was all about mailers, ads in industry magazines and big sandwich boards outside your retail store. Today, however, social media and ecommerce technologies are opening up event sales to broader audiences, with a vastly greater degree of convenience and speed than ever before.
Chris Brogan, an ecommerce blogger and CEO of Human Business Works, points out a number of ways that the internet has made selling your physical events easier and easier. Social media, for example, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube provide for numerous venues to promote your event on a broad scale and take advantage of word-of-mouth advertising for the 21st century. Blogs and email marketing campaigns also allow you additional venues for getting the word out.
However, the most important piece in the event promotion puzzle, argues Brogan is the website. “People need all the details. They need some kind of intangible tangible that they can pass around to point out what’s what. Give them a web page.”
Using your website to allow customers to register and pay for an event is the best way of taking full advantage of the reach of the internet. However, in order to do this, you need an event sales platform that allows you to accurately represent your event and sell tickets online with the same security and reliability that you would market any product. The Upshot Commerce Events Extension provides all the functionality needed to sell tickets and registrations for classes, seminars, conferences, and exclusive events. Essential features of the extensions include:
- Integration with Google Calendar allows you to link ready-to-purchase event tickets directly to your store calendar, for a customer-friendly search experience
- Limited Seating ensures that you will never oversell an event, giving customers the experience they come to expect
- Easy Export Customer List makes registrations and sign ups at the time of your event manageable and easy to track
What is even better, the Upshot Commerce Events Extension is incredibly affordable. Why many event selling services will charge you fees for every ticket sold on your site in addition to a monthly membership fee, our extension is much more simplified with no service charges. The Events Extension is available to users of the Upshot Commerce Core Platform for a monthly fee of just $50 with no set up fees. To find out more, contact us today.