How to sell tickets to a Zoom webinar?

July 18, 2020 12:43 PM

We're resigned to the sad truth that nobody will be joining us for a guided sightseeing tour of Los Angeles in 2020, and are figuring out how to take our show on the virtual road, via Zoom webinars. What is the cheapest, smoothest way to sell tickets for a webinar?

With the number of companies flipping to virtual events, I'm surprised how hard it is to find information about the process of doing this! But maybe you have, and can share your experience?

We want to be sure attendees get their login information upon purchase, that we can communicate directly with attendees via a custom email when they sign up and a mass email for all attendees before and after the event, and that the transaction fees are reasonable. Also, we'd like to have nice looking upcoming events listings on our website and be able to easily share the events on social media.

It looks like Zoom integrates directly with Paypal, and only with Paypal. Not a favorite payment gateway, but we can use it.

Our website is on Wordpress, and we implemented The Events Calendar plug-in (paid service) back when we had physical events scheduled; they require an upgrade to post virtual events. Our physical ticketing has been through Shopify (paid service). There are ticketing companies that sync with Zoom, and are marketing themselves as a solution to handle sales and payment. But do we need to have additional layers between our webinar attendees and Zoom to sell and market these virtual event tickets?

What's the cheapest, smoothest way to sell tickets for a webinar and get this basic functionality?

posted by Scram to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I can't speak from personal experience of event setting up, but I have gotten plenty of webinar tickets through eventbrite.com and it all seems to work.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:24 PM on July 18, 2020 [6 favorites]

The people organizing most of the webinars and online events I’ve attended have been using Eventbrite too, and it seems to work well, at least on the attendee side. I think it may be Paypal only on the payment side though.
posted by scorbet at 1:40 PM on July 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Eventbrite is something we've used before with good results, but they do charge a per-ticket fee, which can be paid by the organizer or passed on to the attendee. I'm just unclear if there needs to be an Eventbrite, or similar interface, between Zoom and the ticket buyer, taking an additional cut.
posted by Scram at 1:59 PM on July 18, 2020

Yes, EventBrite will allow you to create an event and sell tickets to a Zoom webinar. However, the process for sending people confirmations to the webinar and adding them as registrant to Zoom is not automatic. If you're doing this for a small number of people, this is quite feasible, however, anything over a dozen might get a little tedious and it's hard to handle last-minute registrations unless you have someone monitoring emails or set a cut-off date. Here's the basic flow:

• Create the EventBrite event and set the price. (You should be able to embed this to Wordpress as well).
• When a person signs up, you will get a confirmation via EventBrite. You can export the registrant information via a CSV file and copy it over to Zoom. However you will then have to *manually* send each person a canned response with a link to the Zoom webinar.

It's a bit of a hassle and there are plenty of opportunities for making mistakes, so for a smoother experience I'd recommend using Zapier, which is a service that integrates 3rd party services together using a specific "workflow". You can see the details here, but here are a few of the Zoom/Eventbrite workflows:

• Add new Eventbrite attendees as Zoom webinar registrants
• Create Zoom webinar registrants from new Eventbrite orders
• Create Zoom meetings for new events added in Eventbrite
• Create Zoom registrants for new orders in Eventbrite
• Create Zoom meetings for new Eventbrite attendees registered

If this is an ongoing series, i would recommend taking the time to learn Zapier. My other recommendation is to do a trial run with a few of your friends/family using a free EventBrite event (or their minimum priced ticket) just to iron out the kinks.
posted by jeremias at 2:06 PM on July 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

Have you looked into AirBnB Experiences? They seem to have successfully transitioned their physical events to online events.
posted by tumbling at 5:48 AM on July 19, 2020