Maximize event revenue with in-person ticket sales (using the Ticket Tailor check-in app 😌)

If you sell tickets online to your events – and never at the door – it might be time to reconsider your ticketing strategy.  

Selling tickets in-person, as well as online, can come with quite a few benefits… And, thankfully, it’s really easy to do with Ticket Tailor (our free check-in app also accommodates in-person sales 🙌– more on this below). 

👀Tip: It might be that you do sell tickets on the door but use a system that’s separate to your usual ticketing system to manage these. In this case, switching to Ticket Tailor and using our check-in app makes it super easy to reconcile all ticket sales – even cash ones. 

In this quick guide, we cover useful stuff to know about in-person ticket sales, plus the various ways selling tickets at the door can help you run better, more profitable events. Let’s go.

Which events benefit from selling in-person tickets?

First up – it’s important to note that not all events will benefit from holding back a portion of tickets to sell at the door of their event. If your event regularly sells out and accrues an enthusiastic waitlist – aka, it’s highly popular and advance tickets are usually snapped up – it probably doesn’t make sense to sell tickets at the door. This is because you already have the certainty of selling out – so why mess with that? Unless you want to be the type of event that caters to spontaneous ticket buyers and feel confident that in-person tickets will also fly off the shelves. In this case, you could try out in-person ticket sales.

Events that are most likely to benefit from selling tickets at the door include:

• Weather-sensitive events that attract walk-ins if the weather turns out good on the day.
• Events that want to attract foot-traffic, like those in tourist hotspots.
• Events that don’t often sell out in advance.
• Events that are likely to attract a last-minute audience – e.g. cheaper-ticket events, community events, and casual events.

How to sell event tickets at the door of your events

To sell event tickets at the door of your event, you’ll need to be set up with the right tools. Of course, there’s always the option of selling tickets manually (think cash box and paper records). But as we touched on above, this can get pretty complicated and makes ticket sales very hard to reconcile and keep track of. 

Thankfully, there’s a lot of tech out there designed to reconcile online and offline ticket sales. So you can take card and cash payments for tickets at the door of your event, while keeping all your sales data (both online and offline) in one place.

You can find detailed instructions for selling tickets at the door of your event with Ticket Tailor here:

• How to sell tickets in-person using the free Ticket Tailor check-in app]

But in general, the process of selling in-person tickets using a ticketing platform and check-in app goes something like this:

• Get set up with a compatible payment processor – with Ticket Tailor, it’s Stripe
• Set up a new location in your payment processor account 
• Set up in-person ticket sales (including ‘Tap to Pay’) in your ticketing platform Box Office
• Follow the instructions within your check-in app to accept payments and allocate tickets at the door of your event
• Log cash payments within your check-in app so cash sales can be reconciled with card payment sales

🎉 How in-person ticketing for events can help you maximise revenue

We mentioned earlier that, if you’ve never thought of selling tickets in-person at your events, it might be time to reconsider. But why? Let’s take a look:

It opens your event to a spontaneous audience

Selling tickets at the door of your events means you can capture all those last-minute sales from people who may not have thought ahead to buy a ticket. Maybe they weren’t sure what they’d be doing on the day of your event, or just couldn’t be bothered to think that far ahead. Either way, there are always people out there who don’t like to commit to buying tickets in advance. Selling tickets in-person makes it easy for these spontaneity-loving folk to swing on by your event at a moment’s notice. Nice.

You can engage in real-time marketing to passers-by

Speaking of spontaneous, some people may not have even heard of your event until they actually see it in the flesh. Think: tourists wandering around a new town, who stumble across your magic show, history tour, wine tasting event or [insert plethora of other tourist attractions here!]. Being able to engage with passers-by and sell tickets on the spot can be a great string to add to your event marketing bow. It means you can actively engage with people in the vicinity of your event, striking up rapport and hopefully persuading them to grab tickets.

You get the opportunity to upsell in person

If you’re already familiar with Ticket Tailor, you’ll know you can upsell to ticket buyers at the point of checkout. With our Products feature, you can sell everything from drinks packages to merchandise and memberships on your box office page. 

Selling tickets at the door of your event gives you the chance to do the same, only this time using your own real-life charm. Ok, we’re not saying go overboard with the cheesy sales talk here. But there’s no harm in chatting with ticket buyers about all the cool/useful/fun extras they can buy to make the most out of your event. Again, this kind of face-to-face engagement can help you build a rapport with ticket buyers, which can in turn help you to sell, sell, sell. 

What’s extremely useful when considering this 👆is that Ticket Tailor lets you sell merch in-person via our check-in app, too. Which makes it even easier to upsell to all those spontaneous, at-the-door ticket buyers.

It helps you make up for no-shows or low sales

Sometimes ticket buyers don’t show – it’s just a fact of life in the world of events. This isn’t bad for profit per se (as the tickets have already been bought) but it can kill the vibe of what should be a bustling event. Selling tickets at the door of your event gives you a chance to fill out your venue with those spontaneous event-goers we mentioned above. 

If you’ve experienced low ticket sales in general for your event, you can use this as ammunition to really try to drive those in-person sales. In tourist hotspots in particular, there’ll always be people who get caught up in the moment and attend events they probably never would have bought tickets for in advance.

It means you can accept cash payments

Finally, selling tickets in-person means you can cater to people who prefer to pay in cash. Granted, that’s not loads of people these days, but it’s still nice to be able to offer ticket buyers that flexibility. Tourists who spot your event while out and about, for example, may find it more appealing if they know they can pay in cash. If making this possible means you sell even just a few more tickets – it’s worth it!

Selling tickets in-person with the Ticket Tailor check-in app

It’s super easy to sell tickets at the door of your event using the free Ticket Tailor check-in app. Once you’ve got everything set up, you can use the app’s handy Tap to Pay feature which means you can accept contactless payments for tickets with your phone. Or, if ticket buyers want to pay in cash, you can record this within the app, too. 

This feature is fully optimised to make selling tickets in-person seamless, and means you can keep track of ticket sales just the same as if you were selling them online. Woohoo! 🎉

We have a full article with a handy video to guide you through every step of setting up in-person ticket sales on the Ticket Tailor app – check it out 👇.

• How to sell tickets in person using the Check-in app

That’s a wrap – before you plan your next event, it’s well worth thinking about setting up in-person ticketing to maximise on sales and pack your venue out. Using the free Ticket Tailor check-in app makes this a doddle 😌. Good luck! 

🤔 Selling tickets on-site – FAQs

Can I sell tickets in-person and online at the same time with Ticket Tailor?

Yes! You can run online and in-person ticket sales simultaneously, with all data synced in real-time via the Ticket Tailor check-in app.

Can I accept contactless event ticket payments at the door?

Yes, it’s easy to accept contactless payments for event tickets at the door using the Ticket Tailor check-in app, which has a handy Tap to Pay feature. 

Do I need extra hardware to sell tickets in-person with Ticket Tailor?

Nope – just your phone. The Tap to Pay feature lets you accept contactless card payments with no extra hardware.

What percentage of tickets should I hold back for in-person sales?

This really depends on a range of factors, like how your early online ticket sales are going, whether your event is weather-dependent, and how spontaneous your audience is. To give a broad idea, you might choose to hold anywhere between 5-25% of tickets back to sell at the door.

How should I price in-person tickets?

If you expect to make a large percentage of your ticket sales at the door, you might choose to price in-person tickets the same as online tickets. However, many event creators do choose to sell in-person tickets at a higher price than online tickets to encourage attendees to grab their tickets in advance.