As we all already know, ticketing business involves buying and of event tickets. Nigeria is one country in Africa that never lacks events, from music concerts to football matches, comedies and even fashion shows.
Many of these events require that the participants buy tickets, which are probably sold at discounts months to the fixed date for the event.
You can also buy and resell tickets for primary activities like those intending to travel by air or railway travel systems. In this case, you'd be working as a travel agent for the railways and airline companies. Most airline companies sell out their tickets at whopping discounts to customers who intend booking their flights months to their travelling days.
How to Start a Ticket Selling Business Online
You know? For most shows and concerts, prices of tickets keep on increasing until it gets sold out or the even commences. The prices will vary, and will be dependent on the type of event. Also, tickets are usually produced for various classes, the ones for regular, VIP and VVIPs where the lowest priced are the regular.
So while buying the tickets, you need to understand that the higher the price, the lesser the number of people that will be buying them. For example, in most shows, you'd see that the tickets for the regular often gets sold out before the VVIPs. The sitting arrangements will also reflect the tickets the participants paid for.
Tips on how to start online ticketing business in Nigeria:
Having seen an overview of what the ticketing business is all about, we'd now go through what and what it'll take to start and succeed in it as a beginner:• Find ticket brokers
As with every business, you'd need to get professional advise from time to time in the course of running the business. One of the first things you need to do is to find a reseller, someone that will be acting as a broker for you.S/he won't only be in charge of reselling the tickets, but will also help in getting discounts and promotions to for more profit. The broker will in addition, link you up to other brokers around.
• Carry out market surveys
You won't just be going for any tickets you see online, some events are in a higher demand than others and will bring in higher ROI. Another factor that will affect your purchase is your budgeting, ticketing isn't just like any other business that you can buy and sell at any time, it works with time.Don't rush into the business with much enthusiasm unless you're sure much people will be interested in the event. Invest only what you can afford, remember that the idea is to make money and not take risks.
• Buy tickets from authentic sources
While trading on tickets, ensure you deal with only licensed ticket brokers. This is to ensure you get only the authentic tickets from the main source, you know some people can go to the extent of printing tickets just to make more profits.If in any case you want to patronise the local outlets, working with your broker will be ideal in verifying the authenticity of the tickets.
NOTE: While some people will prefer holding their tickets till when the event starts drawing closer, I always advise that people, especially newbies sell the tickets as soon as they're able to make profits. You can still benefit from the late sales, but you won't have to bother about having excesses at the end of the exercise.
• Take your business online
Thanks to the internet, you can now sell your tickets without having to meet your clients one on one. You can get your domain and host from a reliable company like WhoGoHost, set up your website and start selling.Alternatively, you can hire us if you don't know how to create a website. Our services are affordable, fast and reliable. We also offer support and guide on how to manage the site even after delivering the job.
Apart from selling tickets on your website, you can also make money by putting adverts from event organizers. Because of your niche, you won't have issues getting adverts immediately your site starts getting good traffic.
• Choose a good payment option
If you'd be running the business with a website, your web designer will help you set up a payment option. In Nigeria, the most popular ones are the Paystack and Flutterwave, but there are many others.If you'd be receiving money from foreigners, you might have to use other ones like PayPal, Stripe, 2CheckOut and Authorize.net. They all have their benefits and your choice should depend on your target region. For example, if you'd be targeting customers in Africa, working with Paystack and Flutterwave will be the best option as they both accept Verve payments.
If you'd be working with people in the Western World, you'd go for PayPal or other payment options that accept will allow your customers pay with UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard and even cryptocurrencies.
• Start promoting your business
Having set up your business, the next thing in line will be to get it into the eyes of your potential customers. There are many ways of promoting your businesses, nut always ensure you go for the most effective strategies.Leverage the power of the internet by exploring the social media, search engines and other free and paid ways of generating traffic. Remember that there's nothing like excessive advertising, as long as you have products to sell, you should always find ways of getting more users.
Conclusion
There is much potential in ticketing business if don wisely. Like I earlier said, apart from selling tickets on your websites, you can also open up a portal for event organizers to promote their events on your platform for cash. Partnering directly with companies will also help you get the tickets cheaper than the regular prices.What did we miss? You can drop them as comments below and don't forget to share to your friends. You can check out our previous article on 5 profitable businesses you can start without capital in Nigeria.
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