The workshop is planned, the room is booked, the date is set. Then comes the part that quietly decides whether anyone comes: how people find out, sign up and pay. Plenty of good events have half-empty rooms not because the idea was wrong but because signing up was a conversation instead of a link.
Selling event tickets online is not complicated, but it has more moving parts than a normal checkout. You are selling something with a fixed capacity, a fixed date, a list of names that has to exist on the day, and a set of people who need reminding twice before they show up.
This guide covers the full run: choosing registration or ticketing, planning before you build, the registration form itself, ticket tiers, capacity and waitlists, payments and fees, free-event no-shows, promotion, confirmations and QR tickets, reminders, door logistics, refunds and transfers, and what to do in the week after.
Registration or ticketing: which one you need
Registration collects names for something free or invited. Ticketing sells a numbered right to attend and usually involves money. The distinction matters because it changes what you must build: ticketing needs payments, capacity enforcement and something to scan at the door.
Small events blur the line, and that is fine. A free community meetup with a hundred and twenty places is functionally ticketed even without money, because capacity has to be respected. A paid workshop for eight is barely a ticketing system at all — a form and a payment is enough.
Decide by asking two questions. Is there a hard capacity that will be exceeded. Is money changing hands. Two yeses means proper ticketing. One yes means a registration form with the relevant extra bolted on. Two noes means an RSVP and you should stop reading buyer's guides.
Plan the event before you build the form
Write the boring facts down first, because every one of them ends up as a field, a rule or a line of copy. Date, start and end time, doors time, venue or joining link, capacity, price, what is included, who it is for, what people should bring, and the refund cut-off.
Then set your break-even number: how many tickets must sell to cover the venue, materials, catering and your time. Knowing that number early changes decisions — it tells you whether early bird pricing is affordable, when to promote harder, and at what point you should postpone rather than run at a loss.
Finally, decide the go or no-go date. If you have not hit the break-even number by a stated day, you cancel or move it. Deciding that in advance, while calm, is much easier than deciding it in a panic nine days out with deposits already paid.
Building the event registration form
The registration form is the sales page and the data collection in one. The top of it has to do the selling: what the event is, when and where, who it is for, and what someone walks away with. Do not open with a field labelled first name — open with a reason.
Keep the form itself short. Name, email, ticket type and payment covers most events. Add fields only where they change what you do on the day: dietary requirements when you feed people, accessibility needs when the venue has stairs, an emergency contact for anything physical, a company name for business events where badges matter.
If you sell multiple tickets in one purchase, decide whether you need each attendee's details or only the buyer's. Collecting every name is better for check-in and follow-up; asking for five sets of details up front loses buyers. A good compromise is to take the buyer's details at checkout and collect the rest by a follow-up link in the confirmation.
- Event name, date, time and doors time
- Venue address or joining link, added after payment
- Ticket type and quantity
- Attendee name and email
- Dietary, accessibility or emergency information if relevant
- Refund and transfer policy shown before the payment step
- A checkbox for photography consent if you will be filming
Ticket tiers and pricing that create urgency
Tiers do two jobs: they let different people pay different amounts honestly, and they create deadlines. A deadline is the most reliable driver of ticket sales, because for most people the alternative to buying now is not buying later — it is forgetting.
Early bird pricing is the standard version. A cheaper price that ends on a stated date, with the date visible, and the price genuinely rising when it passes. That last part is not optional. Extending an early bird after publicly announcing its end teaches your audience that your deadlines are fictional, and they will wait every time from then on.
Beyond time-based tiers, consider access tiers — standard, plus materials, plus a follow-up session — and honest concession pricing for students or the unwaged. A small number of clearly different options sells better than a long menu of near-identical ones.
- Early bird — cheaper, ends on a published date
- Standard — the main price
- Late or door price — higher, if you allow it at all
- Group or bring-a-friend — two or more at a discount
- Concession — students, unwaged, community rate
- Premium — includes materials, a recording or extra access
Capacity, waitlists and handling sold out
Set the capacity in the system and let it enforce itself. Manual counting fails on the day somebody shares your link somewhere unexpected and you sell fourteen places you do not have. Overselling a physical room is far worse than the sale was worth.
Decide whether to hold back a few places. Speakers, helpers, a last-minute partner and the person who paid twice and needs sorting all consume capacity. Holding back a small allocation costs you nothing and prevents an ugly conversation at the door.
When it sells out, do not take the page down. Turn it into a waitlist. A waitlist fills cancellations without effort, tells you honestly whether to run the event again, and gives you a warm list for the next date. Selling out with a visible waitlist is also the single best marketing asset for your next event.
Taking payments for tickets and handling fees
The payment step should sit inside the registration flow, not after it. Sending people from a form to a separate payment link is where a meaningful share of registrations evaporate, especially on a phone at eleven at night, which is when a surprising number of tickets sell.
Show the full price including any booking fee before the card field. Surprise fees at the last screen are one of the most reliable causes of abandonment, and for a modestly priced ticket a late fee can feel proportionally enormous. Many small organisers simply absorb the processing cost into the ticket price, which is cleaner and needs no explanation.
Set the statement descriptor to something recognisable — your event or business name, not an unrelated legal entity. Ticket buyers often pay weeks before attending, and an unfamiliar line on a statement in the meantime is a common trigger for a dispute you did not deserve.
Free events, RSVPs and the no-show problem
Free events attract sign-ups that do not convert into humans in chairs. This is not a reflection on your event; it is what happens when nothing was risked. Organisers of free community events routinely plan for a substantial share of registrations not showing up, and the honest ones over-book accordingly.
You have three levers. Charge a nominal fee, which changes attendance dramatically even at a token amount. Ask for a deposit that is refunded on arrival, which works well for skills workshops. Or keep it free and manage the gap with a waitlist plus a confirm-your-place email a few days out that releases unclaimed places.
Whatever you choose, make cancelling easy and visible. Someone who cancels three days out gives you a place to resell; someone who feels awkward about cancelling simply does not arrive and you learn nothing until the room is half empty.
Promoting the ticket link
One link, everywhere, repeatedly. Put the registration link in your social bio for the whole promotion window, in your email signature, in every post about the event, and behind a QR code on any poster or flyer. The most common promotion failure is not lack of posts — it is a post that describes the event with no way to buy from where the person is standing.
Email outperforms social for ticket sales almost every time, because it reaches people who already trust you and it arrives rather than waiting to be found. Three emails is a reasonable minimum: an announcement, a mid-window reminder pegged to the early bird deadline, and a last-chance a few days out.
Give past attendees first refusal before you announce publicly. It sells tickets, it rewards loyalty, and a partly full event announces better than an empty one — nobody wants to be the first name on a list.
- The registration link pinned in your bio for the full window
- An announcement email, a deadline email and a last-chance email
- A QR code on posters, flyers and anything printed
- First refusal to past attendees and the waitlist
- A shareable link for speakers and partners to send to their own lists
Confirmations, tickets and QR check-in
The confirmation email is the ticket. It should arrive within seconds and contain everything needed on the day: what they bought, the date and start time, the full address or joining link, directions or parking notes, what to bring, who to contact, and a scannable QR code unique to that registration.
Put the address in the confirmation rather than only on the public page. People search their inbox for it while standing in the street; making them dig through a website on bad mobile data is a small cruelty that generates avoidable messages.
Add a calendar file or an add-to-calendar link. It sounds trivial and it measurably reduces forgetting, because the event stops living only in an email and starts living in the place people actually check.
Reminders in the run-up
Attendance is mostly a memory problem. Three reminders handle nearly all of it: one a week before with practical preparation, one the day before with the address and start time, and a short one on the morning with the essentials and a phone number.
Make each reminder useful rather than nagging. Tell them where to park, what the door looks like, whether food is provided, what to bring, and how to find the room. A reminder that answers a real question is opened; a reminder that only says do not forget is deleted and stops being read.
Include a can no longer make it link in the day-before message. Every cancellation you receive with notice is a place you can offer to the waitlist, and it converts a silent no-show into a filled seat.
On the day: door logistics and check-in
Check-in sets the tone. A queue at the door makes a well-run event feel amateur before anybody sits down. Plan for the busiest ten minutes, which is usually the five before and five after the stated start.
Have two people scanning if you expect more than about fifty people, a searchable name list on a second device as a fallback, and a printed list as the last resort. Phones die, venue wifi fails, and QR codes do not scan reliably on a cracked screen in bright sunlight. Mark people as arrived as you go, so you know your real attendance without counting heads.
Decide in advance how you handle the edge cases: the person who booked under their partner's name, the one who cannot find the email, the walk-up who wants to pay at the door. Having an answer ready keeps the queue moving and keeps you calm.
- Two check-in points for anything over about fifty people
- QR scanning plus a searchable list as backup
- A printed attendee list as the final fallback
- A plan and a payment method for walk-ups
- Someone visible to answer questions and point at the room
- Mark arrivals so you know real attendance afterwards
Refunds, transfers and cancellations
Publish the policy on the registration form, before the payment step, and repeat it in the confirmation. A refund policy discovered after purchase is a complaint waiting to happen; one shown before purchase is simply a term of sale.
The workable default is full refunds until a stated cut-off, then transfers only. Set the cut-off at the point where you commit real money — the catering order, the venue balance, the printed materials. Explain it in one sentence and people accept it, because it is obviously fair rather than arbitrary.
Allow name transfers freely. A ticket that changes hands still fills a seat, still brings someone into your world, and costs you nothing but a note on the list. If you have to cancel the whole event, refund everybody promptly and without being asked; it is the only version of that situation that protects your reputation for the next one.
After the event: feedback, content and the next sale
The forty-eight hours after an event are the highest-value window you will get, and most organisers waste them. People are still warm, still talking about it, and still willing to do you a favour. Send one email while that is true.
Put three things in it: a genuine thank you, any promised materials such as slides, recordings or photos, and one short feedback form with no more than four questions. Ask what they would tell a friend about it, what was missing, and whether they would come to the next one. That last answer is your demand forecast for the next date.
Then keep the list. Everyone who attended, everyone who registered and did not come, and everyone on the waitlist belongs in your audience with a tag for this event. That list is why the second event sells faster than the first, and the fifth sells out in a day.
If you want the registration form, the ticket payment, the QR check-in and the attendee list to live in one place behind a single link, you can set it up free at onesol.io.