The TicketSellers or Eventbrite?
For one reason or another prospective clients are often stuck at the last hurdle of picking between festival ticket selling sites, often choosing between working with The TicketSellers or working with Eventbrite.
This page will give you an honest comparison between the two very different platforms and will help you make up your mind as to which is more suited to your needs.
Self service or full service?
The biggest different between The TicketSellers and Eventbrite is very simple.
Eventbrite is a self service ticketing platform.
The TicketSellers is a full service ticket agent.
What's the difference?
With self-service festival ticket selling sites, the clue is in the name – you have to do all the work yourself.
For some events this is perfectly acceptable and may actually be what you’re looking for. Of course, you can use The TicketSellers platform yourself too but we have so much more to offer.
There are many other self-service festival ticket selling sites out there along with Eventbrite and they are all pretty much the same. The main differentiating factor is pricing which has become a race to the bottom in recent years.
Rather than focus on pricing (which you can read more about here), here are 5 ways in which The TicketSellers offers a better experience to working with a self-service company like Eventbrite.
1. Adding your event
With The TicketSellers you can either do it yourself or your dedicated account manager will do it for you (or alongside you), so you can make sure you’re getting the most out of it. With Eventbrite you will always have to do this yourself.
On the surface this might sound attractive – you can list your event yourself!
But we know that festivals in particular have a vast range of different tickets, at different prices, and there are often complex relationships between them.
At The TicketSellers our event and ticket tools are designed to let you list even large, complex events quickly, make changes to multiple tickets in bulk, streamline reporting across lots of different tickets, and present ticket options to customers in a logical way.
Eventbrite is designed for smaller, simpler events, so their tools are geared towards adding a handful of tickets to an event and working with those. Overall, Eventbrite isn’t tailored to be a festival ticket selling site.
2. Customer service
With self-service festival ticket selling sites of any kind you will have to answer all the customer service enquiries yourself. For small events this might be ok, but as soon as you’ve got a thousand or more customers it quickly becomes very difficult to manage.
Our 24 hour UK-based call centre is there to support your customers. Whether with questions, enquiries, or even to support with placing orders online or over the phone.
You won’t get any customer support with Eventbrite. They will support you – the event organiser – but they won’t offer any support to your customers. Think carefully about whether you can deal with all your customer service before committing to Eventbrite.
3. Account manager
You won’t get a dedicated account manager with a self-service system like Eventbrite. And for some people that might be absolutely fine, you’re happy doing things yourself. We completely respect that. But for those who’d like to tap into industry-wide expertise or just have another brain to bounce ideas off your dedicated account manager is at your service 24 hours a day.
Our account managers are all experienced, enthusiastic and extremely capable events industry professionals. They are here to help you get the most out of The TicketSellers including getting your event on sale, support with marketing, analysing reports and planning your on-site arrangements. In most cases they will actually be at your event to oversee ticket scanning and ensure customers access the event site quickly.
Additionally, because each account manager oversees a wide range of events they see trends across the industry as a whole which you, as the manager of one or a handful of events, won’t necessarily see. They will proactively share insights with you and help shape your ticketing to benefit from trends in the sector.
At Eventbrite and the other self-service companies you won’t get an account manager. You’ll be working by yourself with some email support and online help articles to get by with.
4. A system designed for your needs
With a system like Eventbrite (or any of the other generic self-service ticketing platforms, such as Ticket Tailor, Ticketsrv, Red Box etc) their systems are very good if your needs are quite simple.
For smaller events with a handful of different ticket types and straightforward requirements they are very easy to use. Their tools are all designed for fairly simple scenarios and in those cases they do a good job.
At The TicketSellers everything from our system to our service is tailored for the complex requirements of festival ticketing.
We’ve got a whole page explaining how we make complex ticketing easy, but rest assured that we go out of our way to do the hard work to make your life easier.
Find out more about what we do specifically for festivals here.
5. On-site
With self-service offerings you get access to a ticketing website … and that’s about it. List your event, add the tickets and off you go, you’re on your own.
With The TicketSellers not only are we there every step of the way, from uploading your event through to analysing your sales, we’ll also be at your event. Whether you just need one member of staff – usually your account manager – or an entire team (we send over 20 staff to some events) we will always be there at your event if you need us to be.
At the event we will support our own equipment (scanners, laptops etc) and we’ll also advise on anything else you need help with: box office management, queuing strategies, auditing etc. Because we work with so many events and have so much on-site experience we always have the answer you’re looking for.
With a self-service platform you are expected to manage on site without any additional help, and you’ll probably be scanning tickets using your mobile phone. Trust us, this is fine for 100 or so attendees at a small event, but you don’t want to be scanning tickets using a mobile phone in the rain, mud, bright sunshine and dark cloud, all of which we experience within a 15 minute window at a UK event.