Tickera has gone through a number of huge changes and except being an event ticketing system, Tickera has almost nothing else to do with the initial release reviewed couple of years ago. It’s a whole new plugin!
They’ve made a complete overhaul of the visual part of the plugin, added a plethora of new options and added a couple of more, to their already vast selection of add-ons, which grew the total number to impressive 22 add-ons.
In addition, they have overhauled their website as well, which has completely new visual appeal and, quite frankly, looks awesome and is very well organized although cramming that amount of information on the website surely was quite a challenge.So, back to the plugin…
Tickera Install Screen
If you are starting fresh and installing Tickera for the first time, you will be welcomed with the nice installation wizard that will help you run through the initial setup to get you going as quickly as possible.
During the setup, you will be asked whether you would like to run Tickera as a standalone or accompanied by WooCommerce which then requires Bridge for WooCommerce add-on. Yes, you read it right – Tickera has been fully compatible with WooCommerce for a while now which enables you to sell Tickera tickets as any other WooCommerce product. As you know WooCommerce is one of the best ways to build anonline store with WordPress, and with Tickera you keepall of the additional functionality WooCommerce has to offer in terms of e-commerce features. Quite convenient if you are already running WooCommerce and are selling other items on your website.
Creating Events and Tickets
Creating events is quite easy and straightforward with a little bit of logically organized information required for you to enter regarding your event.
And once you finish creating your event, you will be suggested to create ticket types associated to your event which is also a breeze with plenty of well organized options.
…and you can do that as many times as you want – meaning that you can have as many events with as many ticket types associated to them as you like. No limits whatsoever!
Once you’re done with the easy job of creating event and ticket types, it’s time for even easier job of placing an appropriate shortcodes to any of your pages or posts to display any information about your event and/or tickets. We’re saying “easier” since there is a neat little “shortcode builder” that will create a shortcode for you based on your selection and options.
However, even without placing shortcodes through shortcode builder you can still have all it takes to sell your tickets as event page offers neat feature to display tickets associated to that event automatically.
And the best thing is that Tickera will play nice with virtually any well-coded WordPress theme out there and pick up a style to blend in flawlessly to your website (maybe givethefree WordPress themes from WPExplorer).
Payment Gateways
Now, to start selling anything, you will need a merchant account for some of Tickera supported payment gateways. And there is plenty to select from as Tickera itself currently directly supports more than a hundred payment gateways so wherever you are on the planet, there is a slim chance that you won’t be able to find at least a couple of supported payment gateways available in your country. And even if that happens and none of the supported payment gateways are available in your country, do not fall to despair and check whether a payment gateway you would like to use is supported by WooCommerce since Tickera is fully compatible with it.
Custom Forms
Regardless of whether you are using Tickera as a standalone or you are using WooCommerce as a selling platform for Tickera tickets, you can make use of the awesome Custom Forms add-on. This add-on will allow you to create custom checkout forms any way you like it and collect all sorts of extra information about your attendees with radio buttons, checkboxes, text areas, text inputs and dropdown menus at your disposal to arrange them any way you like. And to top it all off,all of that information can be placed to the ticket template through the corresponding ticket template elements and can be exported via CSV export add-on with all the rest of the data if you decide so.
Ticket Scanning
So you have sold out all the tickets for your event. What’s next? Apparently, you will need to scan those tickets at the door. Tickera’s iOS and Android apps have proven as reliable on the field but in addition to that, they have gone a step further and created Barcode Reader add-on that will allow placing barcodes (as well as QR codes) on your tickets and scanning by using any standard barcode scanner from the back end of your website. However, if you do not feel comfortable allowing other people access to the back end, you can use their fantastic Check-in Chrome Desktop app. Being a Chrome application it is cross-platform ready meaning that you can run it basically anywhere you can install Google Chrome browser. Also, with this app you can scan tickets offline which is a very welcomed feature given that not every event is organized in the area with good internet coverage and sometimes it is missing completely.
Tickera Add-ons
And there you have it… it would be far more easier to conclude this review if there weren’t so many options and sooooo many Tickera add-ons. But given that enormous power lies exactly in those add-ons it would be unfair not to at least mention all of them in addition to the Bridge for WooCommerce and Barcode Reader that we have already written about:
- Tickera Event Calendaradds a nicely styled calendar of your events
- CSV Exportadds functionality of exporting per-event based CSV reports with selectable fields
- Serial Ticket Codescreates arbitrary sequential ticket numbers with custom prefix, number padding, suffix, etc.
- Terms and Conditionsthis should be selfexplanatory…
- Custom Ticket Template Fontsadds the ability to upload your own .ttf fonts and use them on your ticket templates
- Check-in App Translationto translate every bit of iOS, Android or Chrome Check-in apps
- Check-in Notificationsto send welcome email with any content you like to the attendee as soon as their ticket is checked-in
- Bulk Discount Codesperfect for adding large quantities of discount codes
- Role Based Prices have different ticket prices for different user roles
- Customer Connectfor Customer.io integration
- Mijireh Checkout integration
- Mollie Payment Gateway integration
- Slack Notificationsto get notified via Slack when each ticket is sold on your website
- Pushoverto receivea push notification to your Android or iOS device for each successful ticket purchase
- MailChimp integration
- Sendloop integration
- Twilio SMSNotification
- PayPal Chained Paymentsget a cut from each of the tickets sold in your WordPress multisite network
- Stripe Connectto collecta cut from each of the tickets sold in your WordPress multisite network
Wrap Up
Tickera is a great option for adding events to WordPress and selling your own events tickets. Hopefully this overview gave you a good look at what this awesome plugin can do. Have you tried the new Tickera? Or maybe you have some questions about it? Let us know in the comments below – we’d love to hear from you!
