What choosing a ticketing system really comes down to
A ticketing system is the webshop where visitors buy their ticket, plus everything around it: the payment, the barcode, the scanner at the gate and the overview of what has been sold. Almost every system can sell tickets. The difference is in the details you only notice when it gets busy or when the money has to be paid out.
Before you start comparing, it helps to know what festival.productions does and does not do. We do not sell tickets ourselves and we are not a ticketing company. You choose and keep your own ticketing system, and we connect to it so that the sales figures land live in your budget and your day-of modules. So this piece is deliberately objective buying advice, not a sales pitch.
When comparing, pay particular attention to these points:
- The fee model: what a ticket actually costs you, and whether the visitor or the organisation pays the service fees.
- The payout: how quickly your revenue reaches your account, before or after the festival.
- Access and scanning: whether the scanner works offline, and how quickly the queue gets through the gate.
- Data and integrations: whether the sales data is yours, and whether you can pull it out of the system via an API.
- Behaviour under load: whether the system holds up when thousands of people buy at once.
The fee model: service fees, transaction costs and who pays
The price of a ticketing system almost never sits in a subscription, but in the cost per ticket sold. Broadly you see two models. Some providers charge a percentage of the ticket price, often somewhere between 5 and 12 percent. Others charge a fixed amount per ticket, in practice roughly between 30 cents and one euro. For more expensive tickets a fixed amount is usually cheaper, while for cheap tickets a percentage can work out favourably. These amounts are indicative, so always check the current terms with the provider itself.
On top of the service fees come the transaction costs of the payment service, such as Mollie or Pay.nl. Count on around 30 cents per payment for iDEAL (the standard Dutch bank-transfer payment method) and a percentage for credit cards. These costs are fairly comparable between platforms, because they come from the same payment providers.
The most important question is who pays the service fees. With many systems you can choose: you add them to the ticket price so the visitor pays them, or you cover them yourself. Having the visitor pay keeps your margin clean, but makes the ticket at checkout more expensive than advertised.
- Always model your scenario with real numbers: number of tickets times ticket price, with each platform's fee formula alongside.
- Watch for hidden costs: setup fees, monthly charges, cost of the scanning app, cost per refund and cost for extra users.
- Free tickets are free or cheaper with most Dutch providers, handy for guests and crew.
Payout: when your money reaches the account
For your cash flow it makes a huge difference when you get the ticket revenue paid out. Some providers pay out weekly during the advance sale, others only after the festival ends. With some systems the money is in your account within two working days after the event by default, sometimes with the option of interim payouts. This too is indicative, so ask about it.
A payout during the advance sale is helpful if you have to pay suppliers up front, which is almost always the case for festivals. Payment afterwards is safer for the provider, because then there is no money to claw back in the event of a cancellation. So ask explicitly about the payout rhythm and whether an interim payout is possible.
- Does the provider pay out during the advance sale, or only afterwards.
- How many working days after the request or after the event the money arrives.
- Whether there are costs or a minimum amount attached to a payout.
Put the expected payout moments in your budget, so you do not run out of working capital halfway through the build-up.
Scanning and access control at the gate
On the day itself only one thing counts: does the queue get through the gate fast enough. A scanning app on your volunteers' phones is standard by now, but the quality varies. Test in advance how quickly a barcode is recognised and, more importantly, whether the app also works without internet.
At many festival sites the signal is poor, especially when thousands of phones load the network at once. A scanner that only works online then grinds to a halt. So ask about offline scanning and about how the app prevents duplicate scans of the same barcode.
- Does the scanning app work offline and sync automatically later.
- How many scanners or users are included in your package, and what extra scanners cost.
- Can you distinguish different ticket types and time slots at the gate.
- How fast a scan is in practice, and whether that holds up under pressure. Run a real load test.
Data ownership, API and integrations
Your festival's sales data is valuable: who your visitors are, where they come from and how sales are going. Check whether that data is yours and whether you can access it. With most Dutch systems you can export the customer data and connect it to, say, your mailing tool or CRM.
For your budget and planning to move along live, the API is most important. A good ticketing system has an API that lets external systems read out the sales figures. Weeztix, formerly Eventix, for example is built entirely on an API and offers hundreds of ready-made integrations, and most other providers offer at least an export or a connection via an intermediate layer such as Zapier.
This is exactly the layer festival.productions plugs into. We do not sell tickets, but through your ticketing partner's API we read the sales figures live and pull them into your operations system. That way you see in your budget immediately what is coming in, and your capacity and day-of modules move with the actual sales, without you having to retype figures.
- Is the sales and visitor data demonstrably yours and exportable.
- Does the system have an open API or only ready-made integrations.
- Can you read the data live, or only export it afterwards.
Queue and peak load during a busy sales launch
If you sell thousands of tickets at once, for example at a popular advance sale that opens at 10:00, peak load is your biggest risk. Technical problems in ticket sales almost always arise from servers that are not prepared for such a rush.
Larger systems handle this with a virtual queue: visitors get a fair place in line and are let in in a controlled flow, like a lock, so the webshop stays up. That keeps sales stable, but it also has a downside. During long waits, visitors drop off. So choose a queue solution that distributes fairly and clearly communicates how long the wait still is.
- Does the system have a virtual queue for busy sales moments.
- How many simultaneous visitors it can handle without collapsing.
- Does the visitor see a fair place and a realistic waiting time.
If you do not expect a stampede, this matters less. For a festival that sells out in minutes, it is one of your first questions.
The well-known Dutch players and doing the comparison yourself
The Dutch ticketing landscape is large and the providers look alike on paper. An objective picture of a few well-known names:
- Weeztix, formerly Eventix, is one of the larger independent platforms and recently became part of the French company Weezevent. Strong on API, integrations and a ticket shop you can design yourself, and broadly usable for festivals.
- Stager is the de facto standard at many Dutch music venues and concert halls. Strong if you also want to handle programming and venue management, but more geared to the venue than to the standalone festival.
- TicketSoft is a smaller, transparent player with no setup or monthly costs and with weekly payouts. Suitable for organisers who want to keep things simple.
In addition there are dozens of other providers, from TicketView to Tickable, and there are independent comparison tools that let you put ticketing systems side by side. Use those as a starting point, but always recalculate the fees with your own numbers.
When comparing ticketing, also look at refunds: how easily you can refund in the event of a cancellation, and what that costs per ticket. And at white label: whether you can fully brand the ticket shop in your own house style, so the visitor stays within your festival and does not land on an unfamiliar page.
How to get the sales figures into your operations system
Whichever ticketing system you choose, you do not want the figures that come out of it sitting in a separate tab. Your budget, your capacity planning and your run sheet only become truly useful once they move with what has actually been sold.
festival.productions connects to your existing ticketing partner and pulls in the sales figures live via the API. You keep your own ticketing system and your own arrangements on fees and payouts. We are the layer around it: the number of tickets sold flows through to your budget, you see your expected revenue move along, and your day-of modules work with real visitor numbers instead of an estimate.
In practical terms that means: choose your ticketing system on the points in this guide, and while doing so make sure it has an API or a clean export. Then the connection is later just a matter of setting up, not of retyping.
That way the choice of a ticketing system stays where it belongs, with you, while you also make sure the ticket sales do not become disconnected from the rest of your organisation.