When you’re running a festival or other event, using your festival software to sell tickets is only half the battle.

Ticket sales cover critical costs and contribute to the overall profitability of your festival. But the fact is that a significant amount of revenue can come from upselling ticket purchasers with merchandise, concessions, multi-day ticket packages, and more.

In eCommerce, effective upselling has been shown to make a significant positive impact on revenue. It’s also easier to upsell to customers already purchasing event tickets than to find brand new customers.

In fact, upselling can increase your revenue by 30%.

Upselling doesn’t have to mean aggressively trying to sell to customers. Rather, the right approach to upselling is more about offering the right choices at the right time, giving event-goers access to additional purchases they’re likely to be interested in.

You need festival software that provides a more dynamic approach to selling. A software platform that combines different types of transactions from a single point-of-sale, offering a streamlined purchasing experience, will lead to satisfied, empowered customers who’re more likely to buy additional goods and services.

Event software like SimpleTix offers functionality beyond selling tickets, with the ability to upsell to your customers, giving them what they want and increasing your event revenue at the same time.

Here’s what you need to know about using your festival software to upsell like a pro.

Table of Contents:

1. Bundling Merch with Ticket Sales Online
2. Streamlining On-Site Merch Sales
3. Simplifying Redemption with Festival Software

Bundling Merch with Ticket Sales Online

When people attend events, they’re paying for a memorable experience. Mementos like hats, stickers, T-shirts, and posters can commemorate those memories. Pre-purchasing concessions and other upsells lets customers know they’re getting the most out of their time at your venue, and they’re doing it based on the choices they want.

Online bundling allows you to upsell and meet customer expectations:

• Many event-goers want branded clothing; clothing is a leading online sales item–53% of U.S. shoppers purchased clothing online in 2022.
• It’s easier to upsell to people already planning on buying event tickets, especially repeat customers. Upselling or cross-selling to customers you’re familiar with is 60% to 70% sure.
• With the rise of mobile eCommerce, ticket purchasers increasingly prefer to pay online. 22% of global retail sales will be via eCommerce by 2023.

Online festival ticketing software should allow your customers to bundle tickets and merchandise seamlessly, without the need to go through different point-of-sale systems that give customers a clunky and disjointed purchasing experience.

Having one online sales system makes purchasing easy for customers and selling easy for staff. It makes for dynamic selling that’s highly customizable and allows you to present a personalized event experience.

SimpleTix offers the ability to bundle merchandise with ticket sales, with unique functionality through a partnership with Square.

With Square integration, you can add items to your Square catalog, such as different sizes or styles of branded merchandise or food choices at different price points, which you can then bundle and sell when purchasers check out to buy their tickets.

With SimpleTix’s Festival Mode, you can also upsell bundled multi-day festival tickets or offer other specialized ticketing bundles seamlessly.

Streamlining On-Site Merch Sales

In the past, you might have to sell a ticket at a gate using your ticket software, then use another software or device to sell the merch and other add-ons. This approach can create bottlenecks in the process of selling.

Staff must try to get people through the gate quickly, clear lines for on-site merch sales, and keep the entire system as uncomplicated and straightforward as possible.

With Square functionality, SimpleTix provides a multi-level approach to on-site sales.

Scan-and-go entry lets those who pre-purchased tickets get into the venue quickly by QR codes on a digital or printed ticket. With Square, purchases can be made on-site with Apple Pay and Android Pay, chip cards, and contactless payments.

Using the same Square-integrated system, you can sell merch and concessions on-site. Combining and simplifying sales with a single online system lets staff upsell items in your Square catalog from within the same app, and in the same transaction.

Simplifying Redemption with Festival Software

When customers pre-purchase merchandise and add-ons online, it’s not always practical to check them in and redeem their merchandise in the same spot.

Let’s say you’re redeeming T-shirts customers bought with their tickets for an event. If your staff has to scan attendees in and give them their shirts in the same spot, this will slow down your line.

A beer festival is another example where upselling with festival software simplifies the redemption process. A festival attendee may choose to buy a certain number of beer tokens.

With SimpleTix, those “tokens” are digital and are integrated into the attendee’s ticket.

This comes with several advantages:

• Guests and staff don’t have to track physical tokens, which are cumbersome and can become lost.
• Within your Square catalog, you can price different categories and variations of items. In our example of a beer festival, different styles of beer will be priced differently.
• When customers buy tokens, you can use festival software to assign an SKU number depending on the tokens the customer pays for.

Usually, when you scan a ticket, that ticket then becomes deactivated. Because of this, a higher level of functionality was previously unavailable. Now with software like SimpleTix you can place vendors wherever works best for your festival without compromising on efficiency.

SimpleTix festival software lets you upsell to ticket purchasers in a way that’s tailored to what’s most effective for your needs. Whether you’re selling merch, concessions, multiple ticket bundles, or other add-ons, whether it’s online pre-sales or on-site purchases, SimpleTix has you covered.

SimpleTix has offered an affordable, premium event ticketing platform that outperforms Eventbrite and similar apps for over 12 years. Compared to the competition, SimpleTix offers better options at a better price point. To learn more, call us at +1 (855) 550-3670 or email us here.