EventON is one of the highly used event calendar plugins for wordpress with over 49,000 users around the world. EventON users are also going through the the event cancellations as a result of this pandemic. This create new and creative opportunities for individuals and businesses on how they can still continue their business without a physical presence.

Using EventON in an event-less online world

Events connect people together in spreading the knowledge or entertainment. Just because we had to cancel physical events does not  mean an event can not still be continued via online without physical contact with other humans.

An online events can be organized to stream your regular events using 3rd party steaming services like facebook live, youtube, skype or zoom in real time, just like a normal event.

Eg. if you are a comedian and you can not hold comedy shows in physical locations now. Great news is you can use a live streaming service like youtube and stream your comedy shows as an online event.

If your events are classes or seminars such as Gyms or church sermons. You can easily stream your classes and seminars using a 3rd party live streaming service or pre-record the video and make it available for customers to purchase.

Online Event Locations

With EventON 2.8.7 version we added support for events hosted in virtual locations. With this, you can use an online location URL for the event. This information also provide schema data to allow google crawlers to find out.

Tickets for Online Events

EventON provide a comprehensive event calendar and a directory for listing events which are very well developed with schema data for search engine crawlers to find the events. This help you create events in EventON so that they can be found by people searching for such events.

You can sell tickets for online events easily using our Tickets addon. With ticket addon version 1.7.13 you can set additional event information that is only visible to customer once their order is confirmed.

This can be used to show your customers a private link to access the live stream event only after they purchased an event ticket.

Endless Event Audience

A physical event at an auditorium is restricted to the number of seats available, but an online event can have as many attendees as possible because there is no restriction on space available (well as long as your streaming service for online event can handle a huge viewership at one time)

Downloadable Pre-recorded Videos as Events

Ticket addon is powered by woocommerce. Because of that you can convert an associated Woocommerce ticket product into a downloadable product. And add a pre-recorded video of your selling material for customers to purchase.

Other EventON Additions

Countdown addon can be used to add a countdown timer to when the live stream will start.

If you are not planning to sell tickets, but just allow users to RSVP to the live stream events you can use our RSVP addon to setup online events.

Just because the times get tough does not mean everything must come to a halt. Tough times create new creative opportunities. We just have to be smarter than the tough time to take advantage of the opportunities.

If you have other creative ideas for using EventON please let us know so it can help others in similar situations.

Revenue builder bundle for eventON comes with all the necessary addons for your website to setup an automated event submission and event ticket sales system that will power vendor needs. I have covered some aspects of automating your day-to-day ticket sales process in a previous article.

What is Included in The Bundle

Revenue builder bundle comes with four of our top selling addons that are packed with valuable features. These addons are: ActionUser, ActionUser Plus, Tickets and QR Code addon.

How to Charge Vendors for Event Submissions?

Not everyone will want to charge your vendors to submit events to your event directory. However, if you do like the idea of charging vendors for submitting events to acquire prime space in your eventON powered event directory, that can be done using our actionUser and actionUser Plus addon.

ActionUser addon will give you the power for frontend event submissions. Using ajax driven form. But actionUser plus addon takes this further and will allow you to create level based event submissions packages, which your vendors can buy in order to submit events.

This will allow you to have multiple organizers or vendors who will have an account in your website and can buy submissions in order to submit events to your directory. Again, actionUser plus is an option that you dont necessarily need, unless you intend to charge for event submissions.

Tickets Sales on Submitted Events

Our tickets addon is compatible with actionUser addon – meaning, once tickets fields are enabled for actionUser event submisison form, vendors can chose to sell tickets for the event they submit and provide ticket details such as price, stock, SKU etc. The ticket fields will look like below in the event submission form.

Fully Automate Event Submissions or Semi-automate

In actionUser settings you can select how to treat new event submissions. You can set default publish status to be draft – in which case you will need to manually publish these events (aka approve the event to show in your event directory) or set default publish status to publish – in which case, you dont have to do anything the event will get posted on your directory without any supervision.

But it is nice to have control over what get published on your event directory. So most of our customers choose to leave this at draft status.

Charging Commission on Ticket Sales

The great part about eventON tickets addon is that it is powered by woocommerce. Meaning, tickets sales and checkout process for ticket sales are 100% handled by woocommerce. So a commissions or split payments can be done easily for woocommerce sales. However, EventON does not have a native addon that support split payments or commissions, so for this part you will need a 3rd party plugin.

Woocommerce Vendors addon https://woocommerce.com/products/product-vendors/ is a great option for this or you can find other 3rd party plugins for woocommerce that support splitting payments.

Vendor’s Manage Events

ActionUser addon comes with a frontend event manager setup that makes is easy to allow vendors to manage their already submitted event and information for those events. Learn more on how to set up event manager for users.

Vendor’s View of Ticket Sale Data

Event vendors will be able to see a great picture of event ticket sales from their event manager on front-end of your website. You can also allow vendor to checkin guests at their event by enabling event tickets settings > General Settings > Allow event creator to checkin guests via event manager

QR Code Checking

The final step of this whole set up is allowing your vendor to checkin guests using the QR Code addon. Learn more here on how to set up QR Code addon. Once that is set up properly, vendors of your site can easily checkin guests at their event using their mobile phones or using a QR Code scanner.

There you have it, the whole process of vendors adding events to your site – paid or unpaid, setting up ticket sales for those submitted events and checkin in guests at their event using QR Code scanners all while you collect revenue from your vendors.

EventON has been around for almost 6 years now and we are always improving the functionality and user-friendly-ness of our software suite and making them all work cohesively. Which means, in the upcoming updates to our software you can always count on seeing new features that will make your life and your vendor’s life easier and pain-free!

Some of our customers, using eventON today have already untapped this potential of eventON. Let me take you through how you can also automate your day-to-day ticket selling process with eventON by allowing ticket sellers to pay and submit events to your ticket website and collect commission for every ticket sold by your approved seller.

Setup Tickets Environment

First we are going to install eventON tickets addon. In Tickets settings, we are going to set a custom ticket product title that will be used when new ticket products are generated so it looks nice. Then allow check-in guests for event manager. This will allow ticket sellers to checkin guests at their event.

In order to split payments from ticket sales you can use any Woocommerce supported split payment plugins eg. WooCommerce PayPal Adaptive Split Payment Because tickets addon is powered by Woocommerce (wc) you will need to install woocommerce and configure WC to accept payments.

Collect Paid Events

We are going to use ActionUser and actionUser Plus addon next, to allow event submissions and charge for event submissions. After installing these addons, we can go to settings and enable event fields we want the seller to submit information for us.

In ActionUser settings, we will set to only logged-in users can submit events, and assign the event submitter to event after submitting (so he can manage events) and also allow creating new categories on the form.

In the form fields we will enable all necessary fields we want the seller to send event data for an event. Importantly, be sure to select the Ticket Fields.

Under event manager settings for actionUser, we are going to enable all the options. Such as front-end editing, deleting and see events in event manager.

Now under paid Submissions in actionUser Plus, if you want to collect a fee from the seller to submit an event to sell tickets, you can do that by setting up paid event submission settings. Here you can set a cost for submitting events and how many events they can submit at a time etc.

Creating the Pages

Now we need to create a page for sellers to submit their events. We can do that by creating a new event in WordPress pages and using eventON shortcode generator.

In the EventON shortcode generator you can select various options for the event submission form, such as lightbox form, form titles, redirect form after submission etc. Similarly we will create a event manager page as well.

You will also want to create a page and show the calendar with events created by your seller using shortcode generator — so the buyers can find the events to purchase tickets.

The event submission form will look like below for the ticket seller with option to enable and fill in ticket information for their event.

In their event manager page they will be able to see all the events and their ticket stats. They will also be able to check-in guests, and see how many tickets they have sold so far.

And that is it, we are all set. Now all we need is to advertise the event submission page. And every time your ticket seller sells a ticket for his event you will receive a commission. And if you had set up paid event submissions, you will also collect payment when they submit an event.

Other Bells & Whistles

QR Code addon is another one you can add, which will embed a QR Code into the event ticket email sent to the customer. So they can bring their ticket and your ticket seller will be able to scan guests into the events using any 3rd party QR Code scanner apps. You can learn more on how to set up QR Code here.

You can also use our EventON Slider addon to show case events on your site so its more appealing for customers. An example would be to show top 5 events on the slider when a visitor comes to your website first.

Countdown timer is another neat addition you can implement. This neat addon will show how much time is left till the event start or time left to buy tickets.

Automated Income

Just like that you can also set up an event directory site to allow ticket sellers to submit their events and sell tickets so everytime they sell a ticket to events on your website you can earn money. Once this set up is complete it can run automatically without your supervision on every aspect of it.