Buying and selling tickets directly from your phone is easier today than ever. The whole point of getting tickets is so that you can go and have fun at your favorite events. It doesn’t matter if you are going to a concert, a game, or a Broadway show, tickets are a necessary part of getting into your event.
You don’t want the ticket process to overshadow the event. Your focus should be on fun, not on how hard it was to get tickets. That’s why we recommend using e-tickets for events. This makes the process simpler, and it helps you to cut down on the costs of getting tickets as there are fewer delivery fees.
If you’ve never heard about e-tickets, or you have heard but just don’t know how to use them, we’ve broken down the process for you, step by step. So read on, and you will be an e-ticket pro by the end of this.
What is an e-Ticket?
An e-ticket is a digital ticket, one that you don’t need a paper copy of because it’s stored on your phone. These are much cheaper for ticket sites to send out, and much easier for you to keep track of. Losing a few pieces of paper is easy; losing your phone is not. The downfall of a mobile ticket is that ticket sites have had to take measures in order to keep tickets secure and prevent counterfeiting. Luckily, this technology is pretty strong right now, and the best ticket sites out there have these things completely under control. This is why there are certain sites that we recommend and some that we do not fully endorse.
As a general rule, ticket sites do charge you for the delivery of e-tickets, but it never is very much, especially when you consider the costs of having tickets FedExed to you. A lot of people wonder why they do this. Isn’t sending out an email free? Yes and no. Sending an email is free, but because of the storage and the security steps that sites take, there is a cost involved with the protection of your tickets. The nominal cost that you will come across most of the time helps to offset the expenses and ensure that you get exactly what you pay for.
How Do I Use an e-Ticket?
The concept of mobile, or e-tickets, is a pretty simple one. When you buy a ticket, it is either emailed to you, or it is stored in a cloud site affiliated with the site that you purchased the ticket from. Either way, it is pretty simple to get the ticket onto your phone. If you need to take a screenshot of the ticket and its barcode because you can’t have it sent to your email or save it as a file, you can still store it on your phone, reducing the number of things you need to worry about carrying around. When it’s time to get into your event, just have the ticket taker scan the code on your phone.
If you used an app to purchase your tickets, the process is even easier. The tickets will show up in a “Current Tickets” section within your app. If you have multiple seats on the same ticket, you will need to click on the event to see all tickets. When you go to enter the venue, you will open up the ticket, and depending on the app you use, either scan it once or open each seat separately and have each scanned individually. Then, you close out of the app, put your phone away, and go in. It’s that simple.
Some sites require the seller to mail you a copy of the e-ticket. While this is not necessary, it can be helpful. We recommend printing out a paper copy of your e-ticket anyway, and this saves you the trouble of doing so. What if your phone battery dies just as you’re about to get into the concert? Now you have no tickets. Having a paper backup in your pocket will help you get into the event in case of an emergency like this. This way, instead of scanning the code on your phone, you can have a barcode on paper if your phone malfunctions for some reason.
Apple Pay
A handful of ticket websites are beginning to fully integrate with the Apple Pay system. This is exciting for those of us that have iPhones because we already use Apply Pay in our daily lives. Now, paying and getting paid for tickets is easier thanks to how seamlessly this system fits in with the ticket sites.
Millions of people already use Apply Pay on a daily basis. If you’re one of them, using it when you buy and sell tickets is likely to make your life a lot easier. Using mobile tickets makes your life easier anyway, so taking this extra step to simplify things is just a smart move.
Android Devices
If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still buy and sell tickets. A lot of sites use PayPal, which is one of the most trusted and most highly established names when it comes to online payments. If you don’t have a PayPal account, this might be something you would want to consider.
If you don’t have a PayPal or another major e-wallet that you use, all ticket sites do use credit cards. Most people have a credit card as they are an easy way to pay for things, especially when shopping online. All sites accept Visa or MasterCard, while some accept others like Discover or American Express. It all depends on the specifics of the site you are using. Even if you have a debit or a bank card, you can use it as long as it has the logo of an accepted credit card on it, you can still use it at the site. This is bound to make it possible for you to get the tickets you want.
