More and more event organizers are looking to accept bitcoin as payment for tickets, but historically there have not been any great end-to-end ticket solutions that natively integrate bitcoin, resulting in disjointed checkouts and inevitably lost sales.

Zaprite Event Tickets is designed to eliminate friction and drive more overall ticket sales with a superior experience for both bitcoin and fiat purchases than you will find in other ticket platforms. Zaprite’s solution handles everything from ticket issuance to check-in and puts bitcoin and legacy fiat payment methods side-by-side in one unified checkout, with non-custodial bitcoin settlement directly to your wallet of choice (or custodial account). Wherever you are in the world, if you are hosting a conference, summit, retreat or festival and need a way to natively accept both bitcoin and fiat seamlessly integrated with your tickets experience, Zaprite Event Tickets is for you.

Except for the excellent job Bitcoin Prague did building their own custom checkout for bitcoin and fiat payments, paying for your favorite conference or meetup in bitcoin is a rough experience. Like most internet transactions, buying tickets with bitcoin is typically a disjointed journey, like seeing a toy structure built from Legos and Lincoln Logs. Bitcoin is often a priority for an event organizer, but because the major event platforms and ticket distributors don’t value bitcoin and depend heavily on fiat processing fee-sharing agreements to make money, the bitcoin experience is typically dreadful. Not only that, checkouts that are built for fiat are often more complex with unnecessary data collection (even for fiat) which introduces added friction, degrading the buyer experience and resulting in more abandoned purchases.

With integrations into the major ticket platforms that would deliver an exceptional bitcoin experience unlikely for any foreseeable future, we decided to build our own ticketing platform where you can sell your tickets for bitcoin or fiat, side-by-side. As with all Zaprite products, you receive bitcoin with no hold on funds, withdrawals, or payout delays. But beyond enabling bitcoin, this product is designed to upgrade and simplify your TICKETS experience and your PAYMENTS experience at the same time and all with Zaprite.

Before we get into the specifics, here are a few things you should know. While Zaprite does provide an event landing page to showcase your event, the product is primarily focused on selling tickets and the checkout experience Zaprite provides by putting bitcoin and fiat payment options side-by-side. That means if you already have a marketing website for your event, Event Tickets are perfect for integrating into that experience to ultimately sell tickets. 

Whether you are trying to maximize bitcoin sales, or simply want to provide the opportunity for your clients to pay with bitcoin, Event Tickets pair the best user experience for buyers with the simplest experience for event organizers to bring bitcoin to your event.

Here’s how it works.

Create an Event

To create a new event, select Event Tickets in the left hand navigation. Once there you’ll see any existing events, and the ability to create a new one.

The event editor is straight forward, but don’t forget to include your branding color, event images (3:1 ratio recommended), and company logo to create a high quality feel for your customers. Also note that currently email addresses must be collected from your customers in order to deliver tickets post purchase. Other customer fields can be added as optional or required.

Create Tickets

You will create your ticket types within the Event editor. You can create any number of tickets (ex: General Admission, VIP, Tuesday only pass etc…) and manage a total stock of tickets and maximum per order. The currency denomination and tax rate (if applicable) are added globally to the list of tickets.

Check-in Options

There are three ways you can plan to check-in ticketed guests to your event:

1. Ticket Scanner – The ticket scanner for your event is a shareable single page web app that you can use on any mobile device with a camera.  
2. Online check-in – On the admin event page, choose to manage events in order to check in ticket holders as a backup to the ticket scanner.
3. Lastly, on the same manage events page, you can download a CSV of all ticket holders, and print out the list in order to have an offline backup check-in option.

Ticket Sales and Reporting

After purchase, buyers will receive an email with a receipt of their purchase and a link to their ticket. When viewing the ticket, buyers have the ability to download the ticket to their Apple or Google wallet.

Event organizers will immediately see updates to their Event Tickets dashboard, specific Event dashboard, and all transaction and order reports to get visibility into all tickets sold, revenue, stock available etc…

Integrate with your Event Marketing Website

While your event, ticket issuance etc… can live as a standalone on Zaprite, if you’ve already set up a marketing site for your event, it’s easy to integrate Zaprite’s checkout:

1. You can simply link out to the checkout page from your calls-to-action to purchase tickets
2. You can embed the Zaprite checkout via iframe into your custom website.

In either scenario, there is no need to create separate bitcoin and fiat payment paths, and your customers will experience a unified branded and designed checkout experience.

Connect a Wallet

If you’re new to Zaprite, and Event Tickets is the first time you’re accepting payments with us, you’ll want to connect a bitcoin wallet and any other fiat payment methods you want to receive. Just like Invoices, Payment Links, and the Zaprite API, you’ll want to go to our Connections page and follow any number of our guides on how to connect to various custodial and non-custodial wallets. In addition to bitcoin connections, you can choose to add fiat options as well.

Zaprite facilitates bitcoin and fiat payments with an integrated checkout, but we do not operate our own bitcoin wallet. Being that we’re non-custodial, you choose a bitcoin (on chain or lighting, custodial or non-custodial) wallet from our supported list of connections and bitcoin goes directly to your custody solution of choice. We never touch your funds, and you never have to wait for us to pay out. 

Learn More

Learn more about Zaprite Event Tickets by watching Parker Lewis’ webinar which walks through all the aspects of creating and managing an event with Zaprite. Also check out our Zaprite Pricing associated with ticket sales, or reach out to sales@zaprite.com.  

If you are interested in becoming a Zaprite customer or have questions about Event Tickets or any other questions about using Zaprite, feel free to reach out at https://help.zaprite.com.