Integrating Ticketor with Your Site

So before integrating a website with Ticketor, you may also consider using Ticketor as your main website. Even-though it is totally optional, but in many cases, it is your best option and will result in great advantages.

The 2 options you are exploring are:

• Have Ticketor as your main website, on your main domain and do all your tickets sales, merchandise sales, donation collection, etc. on the main domain. Also have all your informational pages, articles, and blog on Ticketor. Optionally, if you have other functionality that is not supported by Ticketor, integrate your Ticketor site with those functionality.
• Have a website on your main domain that does everything but ticketing and events, and have ticketing and events on a subdomain or on Ticketor.com and integrate or embed that into the main website.

The website building functionality is included for free in all Premium plans and does not cost you anything extra. It is easily manageable by yourself or users who may not be tech-savvy.

Here are a few questions you may want to answer before making the decision:

1. Do you already have a website? Or do you like your current website? If no, you should definitely try Ticketor as your official website.
2. What is the main point of your website? If your main point of your website is to promote events and sell tickets, collect donations, sell merchandise and give information about your organization, events and services then it is best to have Ticketor as your main website. Why would you want to have a website that only acts as a shell and integrate it with another site that does all the important tasks?
3. What is the main revenue of your business? Tickets and events? Or something else. Your main revenue-maker functionality should probably be your main site and on your main domain.
4. Is your current website “Always-on” or “Highly available” or it may go down in the middle of a sale or during high traffic? What happens if your site goes down? Do you have on-call engineers or support team that can help bring it up and running again ASAP? Do you have systems in place to notify you if the site is down? If the answer to these questions is no, you probably want to consider having Ticketor as your main site.
5. Is your site secure ( on https ). What happens when your SSL certificate expires? Do you have resources to update your SSL certificate if it expires? In no, you cannot sell tickets or merchandise on a website that is not secure.
6. Is your site mobile friendly and responsive? How does it look and how does it function on a small mobile or a big monitor? If your site is not mobile friendly, then any site that you embed in that, will not be mobile friendly either.
7. Does your site have proper SEO and search engine optimization? Do you use the proper html tags, meta data, and structured data for your events? Are your URLs and Links SEO-friendly? Do you use Sitemap and Robots.txt to instruct search engines how to navigate your site?
8. How easy is it to update the content of the site? Add a page? Upload pictures? Do you do it by yourself or do you have to hire a webmaster to do it for you? Does it cost you? What is the wait time?
9. How much does your site cost? Hosting, SSL certificate, maintenance, webmaster, etc.?
10. Do you back up the site properly and frequently? How often? Do you know how to restore a backup if you need to and how long does that take?
11. Do you have sign up functionality on the site? How does the sign-up work with the rest of your site functionality like ticket purchase or making donation? Does the user have to have multiple accounts or sign-up multiple times?
12. Do you have a newsletter functionality? If so, do you have options that allow the user to join, opt out or update their information? Is it all automated or do you have to manually take care of the request?
13. Do you use cookies? Do you have a cookie manager system to ask permission for cookies?

Here are some advantages you get by using Ticketor as your main website:

• Event ticketing is a sensitive and time sensitive problem and we at Ticketor understand that. We understand the effect of down-times in the middle of the sales, at the box-office or during scanning and admission. We understand that your website must be always available and your data should be protected and backed up.
• Most other website builders and hosting companies are not built with the time-sensitivity in mind and are not built to be highly available. Often, they may go down for scheduled or emergency maintenance and may get down for hours and so are not suitable for ticketing.
• We have considered high availability in every step of our process and building the site and we have 24/7 on-call engineers who monitor the site and receive alerts if something does not work properly.
• Ticketor’s revenue structure is based on the amount of your sale. In other words, we don’t make money unless you make sales and money. As a result, it is our highest priority to provide you with greatest SEO (search engine optimization), marketing and advertising tools to make sure you can sell out every event! We implement the best, most complex and most recent SEO techniques to make sure your site is indexed and highly rated by Google.
• Also, we make sure your site is easily usable on every device and mobile and we try to provide the best and easiest user experience.
• All the cost of owning a website including the hosting fee, SSL certificate, maintenance, backup, etc. is covered and you don’t have to worry about the hassle or cost.
• Also, the website building functionality, including designing the site, creating content pages and landing pages, etc. are very easy and can be done by yourself. The following articles and videos show you how to design your site, and how to create and manage content for your site.
• Moreover, by using Ticketor as your main website, you will have a seamless, fully integrated process. One sign-up system and one account that is used for buying tickets, merchandise, making donations, newsletter, season passes, coupons, and everything else with full control to the buyer to manage their private information, mailing list preference and cookies with the ability to delete their personal information for compliance with law, all in a self-service manner.
• Also, a single reporting system for your managers and accounting team.
• Another SEO benefit is that Google loves events and ticketing information. If proper structural data, which is hidden to the users, are available on your site and domain, Google considers the site as high priority and time-sensitive and so they index your content more frequently to make sure they have updated events information, ticket prices, and ticket availability. It is a huge advantage to have such information on your main domain and not a subdomain or a 3rd party domain.

If your site acts as a shell and does nothing more than providing information about your organization and events and links or embeds another site that does everything including selling and managing tickets, merchandise, gift cards, donations, newsletters, user account management and more, then what is the point of the main site and why wouldn’t you want to keep it?

If you decide to use Ticketor as your main site, you have 2 options for migrating:

One option is that you can build your new website using Ticketor, build pages, content, events and when you are ready at one point, switch your domain to point to your Ticketor-based site and replace the old site.

The second option is a gradual transition. You can build your Ticketor site and events, either on Ticketor.com or a subdomain and integrate it with your main website as explained below and gradually migrate your pages and contents to Ticketor and finally replace and retire the old site.

When it comes to integrating ticketing into your site, there are different options.

1. A button or link that is posted on the main site and takes the buyer to the ticketing page
2. Embedding ticketing as an iframe or pop-up
3. Full link exchange

You can use a combination of all the above to get the best result.

Site Pages and Structure

First let’s learn about your Ticketor’s site pages.

Your Ticketor site has a page for “Upcoming Events” that lists all your upcoming events. This page is available in different format and variations such as gallery view, list view, calendar view and map view. For example, https://www.ticketor.com/demo is the link to our demo site’s upcoming events page and https://www.ticketor.com/demo/calendar and https://www.ticketor.com/demo/map is the calendar-view and map-view version of the same page.

Each event has a dedicated ticketing page and URL that is specific for that event. For example, https://www.ticketor.com/demo/tickets/a-kids-show-1323 is the URL to the Kids show on our demo site. If you use the short, friendly URL, it will be ticketor.com/demo/KidsShow adding #buy to the URL will scroll the user to the main ticketing area for example, https://www.ticketor.com/demo/tickets/a-kids-show-1323#buy takes you to the Kids show ticketing page and scrolls you right to the pricing and seating chart section.

Recurring events also have a dedicated calendar view page that shows all recurrences of the event.

Similarly, you may have one or more store pages for selling merchandises. For example, one store page for gift cards, another store page for food and concession and another store page for other merchandise and CDs. https://www.ticketor.com/demo/store is the URL to our demo site store page.

Each merchandise has also a dedicated page. https://www.ticketor.com/demo/shop/100-00-gift-card-10544 is the URL to the “$100 gift card” on our demo site.

You can also have one or multiple donation pages for different causes. https://www.ticketor.com/demo/donation is the URL to the donation page on our demo site.

Since each item or functionality has a dedicated page, you can easily link to that page or embed that page.

Note: If you move the site to your own domain, such as MyBusiness.com all the www.ticketor.com/demo in the sample URLs above will be replaced with MyBusiness.com for example www.MyBusiness.com/KidsShow or in case of sub-domain tickets.MyBusiness.com/KidsShow or BoxOffice.MyBusiness.com/KidsShow

Getting the Embed Code or URLs

To get the embed code or URL or code for a pop up of any of your Ticketor’s site pages, simply go to the page that you want to embed.

Then go to Control Panel > Account & Settings > Embed / Add to the site.

A pop-up opens up that allows you to get the code you need. You can select the page you want to embed as well as the method of embed and options. You can also see a live preview of how the selected options will work.

• In the pop up, you will get to choose what page you want to add to your site. There is one entry for common pages or your upcoming events or you can choose “Current Page” which means the page that you are currently on.

  Note: For public use, make sure to use a page that is available to public, such as ticket purchase page, and is not behind login. However, Ticketor also allows you to embed administrative pages that require log in such as event creation page or report pages. If you embed an administrative page, the user will need to log in with proper credentials to access the page.

• Select the method of embed. You can choose to get the link (URL) to the page, or an iframe, pop up or WordPress short code. If you select a method that loads the content on your site in the form of iframe or popup, you should make sure that your site has good quality as the quality of the outcome is significantly affected by the quality of the page it is embedded in. Your page should be secure and only open on https (http traffic should get redirected to https), it should be mobile-friendly, and it should be highly available.

  Popups usually work better that iframe as they are less affected by other controls on the page. If you use an iframe, make sure that you embed it into an element that can grow in height indefinitely as the iframe will grow when needed and you don’t want to end up with inaccessible content or double scrollbars. Also try to embed in a full-width element so the iframe will have enough room, especially on mobile devices.

  Using a link or button that points to your Ticketor site is always the safest and easiest options.

• In the options area, depending on the selected method, you will see options for your embed code.

  If you have selected the option to embed in your site as an iframe or popup, you will have the option to allow the links and consecutive pages to open in the same area or in the parent page or a new tab. We recommend opening in the parent window to provide a richer experience and to make sure the potential issues with your site does not affect the purchase process.

• Finally, you can copy the code and use it in your site. In case of a URL, you can also generate and download a QR code that opens the URL.

While most systems only offer iframe as an integration method, Iframes are not sufficient.

Using iframe as the only method of integration will hide and cover most of the important site functionality.

Remember that ticketing is not just about selling tickets. A user should be able to log back in to print and manage their tickets, exchange or return them if allowed by your policy, print their invoice or receipts, use their store credit, gift card or season pass, check their gift card balances or check the status of their orders.

Also as required legally in many areas, they should also be able to view and edit their personal information, name, email, phone number and be able to opt in or out of receiving newsletters and communications or set their cookie preference.

So, while iframe or popup on your site is a very good starting point, you should have a method to allow buyers to access other functionalities.

Link Exchange Method (Recommended)

The point of link exchange is to provide a method for the buyers to access your box-office site and be able to get back to your main site, seamlessly and without noticing that they are on different sites or use different technology.

This is the best, easiest and safest integration method and makes sure that your ticketing functionality will work regardless of the quality of your site and even if your site is completely down.

You can see an example of link exchange method in most big websites such as banks. If you go to a bank website, you will notice that different functionalities of the site might be on different subdomains, on different servers and managed by different teams. For example, the main site may be on Bank.com while the credit cards are offered on CreditCards.bank.com and investments accounts are offered on investements.bank.com.

The feel and look of all these sub-sites are the same and when switching from one to other, you won’t notice any change in the feel and look and branding.

All these sub-systems are on the same domain, potentially different sub-domains.

The top menu or navigation system has same or similar items, regardless of what sub-system you are on and there is always a button on the menu that takes you to the homepage or the main site.

Achieving the same functionality with Ticketor is very easy.

1- Design your Ticketor site

Design your Ticketor site to have the same feel and look as your main site. Use the same logo, theme, background color or picture, header color and top navigation style.

You can do that using the Control Panel > Account and Setting > Design and it can be done in just a few minutes.

You can read our article and video on how to design your Ticketor site for more information.

2- Optionally, move your Ticketor site to a subdomain

Now, move your Ticketor site to a subdomain of your domain such as tickets.MyBusiness.com so when users go to your Ticketor site, they will still remain on your domain.

This step is optional but gives you a fully-branded experience.

You can read our article and video on how to move the site to your domain and subdomain for more information.

3- Create a consistent navigation for both sites

Next, you need to create a navigation system that is similar on your both sites and allow the users to move back and forth between the 2 sites.

You can start by adding an item named “Tickets” or “Box Office” to your main sites navigation that points to your “Upcoming Events” page on Ticketor.

You can pick and choose any page or functionality from Ticketor and add it to your main nav or sub nav on your main side. For example, you may want to also add the “Calendar” page, “Donation” page, “Store Page” or any other page that you would like to use from Ticketor.

Then on your Ticketor site, you want to do the same thing and add items to your nav that point to your main site.

To do so, use the Control Panel > Account & Settings > Pages & Navigation.

Add a page, either to the main nav or a sub nav, of type “Link to another page” .

For example, you may want to add a “Home” button to your nav that points to www.MyBusiness.com/home

Add a page of type “Link to External Page”, set the menu text to “Home” and the URL to www.MyBusiness.com/home and “Save”.

Then you can use drag & drop to arrange and re-order the items in your top-navigation.

You can read our article and video on “How to add pages and content to your site” for more information.

Pick and choose and gradual migration

This method allows you to pick and choose functionality from Ticketor or your existing site. For example, you can choose ticketing functionality from Ticketor and Store or donation functionality from your current provider.

If you prefer to migrate your Store and Donation functionality to Ticketor to have a consistent user experience and fully integrated ticket purchase and donation and merchandise, you can gradually move those functionalities to Ticketor as you get a chance.