Frequently Asked Questions             
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  1. Why should I sell tickets online? In a word, convenience.
    1. Convenience for your patrons = more sales
    2. Convenience for you: You put the online buy link on your web and collect your money.
    3. Lowers costs: Selling tickets online saves time (Time is money!!) by eliminating interruptions. You can process your sales in a batch when it's convenient for you, not whenever someone walks in or phones. Self-print tickets gives you the ultimate convenience and time saving: it completely eliminates fussing with tickets. You can redirect your staff resources for more interesting and creative things.
    4. Incredibly valuable marketing data for you with no effort: We capture the names addresses and emails of everyone who buys a ticket to your event. You lose this when your patrons pay cash. If they pay by cheque you have to manually copy the data. True you get this data if you accept cards over the phone, but then you have to pay someone to man the phone.
    5. Protection for your patrons in case of ticket mishaps. Lost ticket? Not a problem if you bought it online. See the General FAQ for all the multiple and redundant protections online ticketing offers.
    6. Increased revenue: If you move to reserved seating, your patrons will be willing to pay higher prices further in advance for a guarantee of sitting where they want.
    7. Centralized management: With our tools you can integrate your online and offline sales and have your customer data in a place where all your staff can access it easily. And by Q3 2007 we expect to have emailing lists integrated. These are powerful marketing tools!
    8. Reports and data mining: Our database can produce analytical reports. The sky and your imagination is the limit with reports. If we're not showing you the data the way you want to see it, it is easy for us to add custom reports to the system. Yes, analysis can be done with your legacy spreadsheets, but it's typically hours of excel time. We can automate it for you.
    9. Coolness factor: Your organization appears progressive and savvy when you have online sales

  2. Is this software that we install on our site or do we send our visitors to Tix•R•Us? You can describe the show, the ticket options etc all on your site as much as you like. However, because we are the financially responsible party, you send your visitors to our site for actual ticket reservation and checkout. We provide you with buttons to do that, and we don't care how much you customize what they look like. You don't have any complicated software to install or configure. Just log on, set up your show, copy your button code into your web.
  3. Can you cobrand the buy page to look like our site? Yes, we can include your header, and the buy page opens in a window that doesn't include all the normal web tools, including revealing the orignating URL. Most customers will still think they are on your site.
  4. How do I manage my show? We have an administrator panel where you can create a show, set up the ticket prices, assign prices to seats, view reports on your show etc.
  5. What are the technical requirements of your software from the client end? Our admin panel has been tested on IE and the mozilla based browsers, such as Netscape, Mozilla and Firefox. To run the admin panel you need Javascript enabled and cookies. The public ticket buying panel requires JavaScript for reserved seating events, and cookies for all events.
  6. We already sell tickets online and it's not that big a deal. Why should we use Tix•R•Us when we can do it ourselves? If you've already discovered that selling general admission tickets online is fairly easy, that's great. D.I.Y. can be a cost effective option for general admission and a lot of venues do it successfully. However, if you don't have a clue how to do it, we can set up general admission for you in a few minutes. Furthermore, you'll find that offering reserved seats is desireable because patrons are willing to pay higher prices for them and you will also sell more further in advance. Handling reserved seating presents greater technical hurdles both online and offline that may not be immediately obvious until you try it. Many venues hesitate to offer reserved seating for this reason. But we've solved the problems. Leverage our expertise! Why not augment your general sales with a reserved section and let us do it?
  7. We're not big enough to do reserved seating. WRONG! We've distilled it down to a process. Venues that never thought they could do reserved seating can now do it affordably.
  8. Would you ever consider selling your software? Our software is written with a view to portability and ease in configuration, but for the moment we are not selling it.
  9. When will we get paid? We make every effort to pay you the business day after each of your shows. We might make a mutual agreement to lump payments for multiple performance shows into weekend units, especially if the amount of money is small.
  10. What form will we be paid? Cashier's cheque sound good? Delivered to the designated representative of your organization?
  11. Can you handle reserved seat ticketing? We specialize in that. Your patrons can choose their exact seat from a floor plan of your venue.
  12. What methods of payment will you accept? Nothing but the best and most convenient.. their VISA or mastercard.
  13. I'm not comfortable with a third party handling that much money. Can the money be routed directly to us?If you have a financial processor that can accept credit cards online and if you provide us with the necessary technical information to route money to it, we can, for a one time fee to cover the creation of a custom gateway page, cause the money to go directly to you. We are still doing all the box office management. In this situation we simply invoice you a percentage of your sale for our services.
  14. How will our patrons know their credit card data is secure? Our transactions are handled through the encrypted secure sockets layer and our integrity is certified by a recognized third party. Look for a padlock icon at the bottom of your screen. When your browser is running an encrypted page it appears in the locked position. If you click that padlock you will see something like this: sslcert

    If you click the View Cert Button it will show you the SSL certificate that your browser has decided to trust:

    sslcert
  15. Can you handle general admission ticketing? General admission seating is not nearly as complicated. We can do general admission ticketing without a floor plan. With general admission, we will provide you a copy of or a link to the floor plan if we have one so that your patrons can see what the venue is like if they wish. The buy button just requests a certain number of tickets from a particular price group.
  16. Can you handle discounts, i.e. the customer may choose to pay senior, club membership, or student rate for a seat that someone else would have to pay a different price for?Yes, as of July 2007 we have that covered. The customer first reserves the seat, and before being allowed to check out he must choose the price tier that applies to him.
  17. Do you provide any mailing list support?Mailing list support is planned in Q4 2007. There will be a very reasonable charge for it.
  18. What if I want to put on a show at a venue that you don't have? If the show is a reserved seat affair we have to add that venue to our venue database by creating a map of its seating plan. If it is general admission, we can sell tickets without a venue map.
  19. Does it cost anything to create a new venue? Adding a new venue name and address to our database is always free. Adding a floor plan requires staff time, and works as follows: If we get $30,000 worth of ticket sales within twelve months from that venue, we refund the map set up fee to the organization that paid it. For example one could generate $30,000 in sales with only ten sellout shows in a 300 seat house at $10 per ticket. Any ticket sales from that venue count, not just sales from your organization, so tell your friends. We charge $20 per hundred seats to create a map because we can't know in advance what will happen. This fee may be waived or reduced in certain cases.
  20. What if I have to cancel my show? That is why we collect a cancellation deposit. We assume financial responsibilty for all financial dealings connected with your show, including refunds, and it costs us to make refunds as well as to receive payments. So we deduct the actual cost of the refunds plus staff time to do it from your deposit if that is the case.
  21. What if one of my patrons loses or never receives their ticket? Physical delivery services are not 100% perfect, and people misplace things. But not to worry. In the first place, each transaction receives a receipt which they are urged to print out and keep as a backup. If that also fails, one of the reports the system produces is an itemized list of all the people who purchased tickets online. So all that patron will have to do is identify himself and he can be seated. We can not provide this security to patrons who pay cash at outlets. If they lose their tickets it is up to your ushers/box office to deal with it.
  22. What if I want some tickets to be physically at ticket outlets? Simply tell the system which tickets are where. Tickets marked thusly will not be available for sale online, but because we're helpful people, those tickets will cause a little window to pop up that gives the name and location of the outlet that has them. Note: You are responsible for the correctness of what you tell the system. If you give a ticket to a physical outlet and fail to inform Tix•R•Us, you risk the embarrassment of selling it twice.
  23. How do I comp tickets? You simply go to your control panel, access the panel for a particular show, select the tickets you want to comp and mark them as comp. They will appear to your users as sold.
  24. What about those tickets patrons can print on their own printers? Tix•R•Us supports this ticketing method. We offer you the option to enable it, or not, as you see fit. We recommend at least one barcode validator (Tix•R•Us has several available for rent) and computer (probably a laptop) at the box office. It works best if you have an internet connection at your venue but we offer a standalone (non internet) validation method that will be OK for small venues. If you don't anticipate a problem with your public trying to use counterfeit tickets, you may opt just to accept the self print tickets without electronic validation--many smaller venues do just fine without it. We believe self-printing is the progressive future-minded way to do ticketing.
  25. But what's to stop evil people from jacking the html and making fake tickets or just color photocopying legitimate tickets? Hee hee. Let 'em try! That's why we validate. Validation is very fast and easy with a scanner but may also be performed manually. To save time you may choose to only validate a sample of the tickets. The probability of guessing a correct validation code is infinitessimal. And by the way, each code will only validate ONCE; after that it's flagged as a dupe. It may be more cost-effective to you to absorb a small amount of cheating rather than spend a lot of resources making sure none gets through.
  26. Can you handle season tickets? Yep. Several types actually. We create a special event called a season, that consists of all events in a series for that season, i.e. you have to create all the individual shows first. Then you just set up the season tickets same as for any single show. We have several options:
    • The single-show per event fixed seat option: When a patron buys a season ticket for seat 25-B, all the seat 25-B in all the linked shows will instantly be statused as sold.
    • The privelege-reservation system: Buying this type of season ticket does not guarantee seating, but the season ticket holders are allowed on the site to reserve their seats before the general public. In this scheme, season ticket holders are issued a password to allow them to reserve seats before the general public can.
    • The all-at-once system: This type of season ticket allows the holder to reserve tickets for one performance of each show at the time the ticket is purchased. It might or might not be the same seat each time.


  27. Can you print my tickets for me? You bet we can. We can print gorgeous full color tickets, and we can even do a custom ticket design for you. We price these individually depending on the number of tickets and the complexity of the design.
  28. Can you fulfill ticket orders via U.S. mail or other courier?Again, yep. Either we do it or you do it. The patron is assessed an additional surcharge for this service. If we fulfill the tickets we just keep that bit to cover our costs. If you do it, we include it in your payment so that postage expenses don't bite into your profits.