Allowing your attendees to register and pay for your events or classes online is an excellent idea! It’s been said that over 75% of event managers prefer to pre-register attendees online.
Accepting registrations online can streamline your customers’ experience and incentivize them to do more business with you, thus increasing your revenue. It’s a no-brainer!
To accept online registrations, you must first sign up for an account on some type of online event registration website. A quick Google search will reveal that your options for event registration providers are limitless, so you decide to look into a brand you’ve heard about recently: Brown Paper Tickets.
But is Brown Paper Tickets really the best choice for your event business? It very well may be. But you owe it to your business and your customers to look carefully at your options.
As a provider of event registration software and online ticketing services, naturally, we’ve got some things to say on the matter.
Brown Paper Tickets vs. Event Smart—What’s the Difference?
Despite having strikingly similar functionality, Brown Paper Tickets and Event Smart provide very different services.
Let’s start with the obvious first question: What do they each cost?
Brown Paper Tickets provides its basic software for free, while it charges the ticket buyer for every ticket you sell, around one dollar, while also charging credit card processing or PayPal fees. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like the idea of passing the ticketing fees onto the buyer, as this usually leaves the ticket buyer feeling underwhelmed.
Brown Paper Tickets passes the ticketing fees on to the ticket buyers.
Event Smart likes to keep it simple…hence the name! Our all-in-one software allows you to accept registrations, sell tickets, track attendance and much more, for both free and paid events (Brown Paper Tickets is only free if the event is free). We recommend that event managers take it for a test run with our free trial. For full details on costs and what it includes, check out our pricing page.
The key difference between Brown Paper Tickets and Event Smart is the type of service each company provides. Here are some examples:
- Brown Paper Tickets is a platform that allows event organizers to plan, promote, and sell tickets to events. Basically, it provides users with an event ticketing marketplace, which is great for one-off-events, while Event Smart provides event businesses with a dedicated event website, perfect for selling tickets for one event or multiple events and aggregating data between different events.
- Brown Paper Tickets only offers three payment options, such as Brown Paper Tickets Credit Card Processing, PayPal, and bring-your-own credit card processor (their website doesn’t say which companies are supported), while Event Smart offers a vast range of ticket payment options, which range from standard credit/debit cards to checks, PayPal Pro, and bank drafts, which are listed on our site.
- Brown Paper Tickets Pricing is $.99 + 3.5% per ticket, while Event Smart offers a free basic option as well as two paid tiered software options and no per ticket fees.
What’s the Difference Between an Event Ticketing Platform and Dedicated Event Website?
Event ticketing platforms, like Brown Paper Tickets and Eventbrite, use the “one-to-many” approach, meaning that lots of businesses are sharing one main website to sell tickets.
While dedicated event websites, such as the ones Event Smart provides, belong to only one business.
Is a Dedicated Event Website or an Event Ticketing Platform Right for You?
Both platforms have advantages and disadvantages. Consider these key points when deciding which type is the most advantageous for your event business:
- Do You Want to Sell Paid Tickets for Free?:
- With a dedicated event website, you can sell 1 million PAID tickets online for free. That’s right, you can use a free account on EventSmart.com to sell tickets or registrations to your paid events. You don’t even have to be a “non-profit” organization. Everyone gets this discount! Sell unlimited tickets for free.
- With an event ticketing platform, such as Brown Paper Tickets, everyone pays the same service fees, transaction fees, and ticketing fees. There are no discounts unless your tickets are completely free.
- Who Controls Your Funds?:
- With a dedicated event website (such as your own website or an Event Smart website), using your own payment provider, transaction proceeds, less processing fees, are deposited directly into your business bank account. There are no additional processing or ticketing fees deducted from your earnings.
- With an event ticketing platform, such as Brown Paper Tickets, transaction proceeds go to the service provider and are then deposited into your bank account at the provider’s discretion. There are no industry standards or rules that govern how the provider handles or disburses your money. The provider makes the rules and can change them at will, so if you choose an event ticketing platform to pay very close attention to the contract terms and any changes made to them. For example, when using Brown Paper Tickets Payment Processing to collect payments, your payout will start processing 10 days after the event ends.
- Do You Already Have a Merchant Account for Processing Credit Cards?:
- Event Smart is integrated with more than a dozen payment gateways. You use your own payment gateway account (e.g. use your own PayPal, Stripe, etc) to get paid directly and only pay their fees.
- Brown Paper Tickets defaults to their in-house payment processing, which, as mentioned above, will start processing your payout 10 days after the event ends. This is not optimal for most event managers, as the funds from tickets sales are sometimes required throughout all stages of the event. However, they do offer two other payment processing options, bring-your-own, and PayPal but Brown Paper Tickets still acts as the middle-man in the payment process, which means you might not get the same rates as if you were independent of Brown Paper Tickets.
- You Want to Tell Your Story with a Blog:
- With Event Smart you can do much more than creating a ticketing page. You can cultivate and build an audience by publishing about your events and giving people an example of the experience they will have. Blogging can help set and meet expectations all at the same time. In addition, you can also create pages, and upload shareable images and videos.
- With Brown Paper Tickets, your just another customer and event, in the mix of millions of other customers and events. You don’t have the option to tell your story or market other services.
- Your Branding is Important to You:
- Your events portray your products, your services, and your overall brand experience. With Event Smart you can do more than customize colors and change a picture on your event page. You can pick an entirely new theme to set the overall tone and layout of your event website to showcase your brand. When running your event, we do our best to stay out of the way. Event Smart has very limited branding on your event website in order to have as few distractions as possible. You can provide as little or as much information as you want, but blogging and static pages (see #4 above) help keep your site nice and tidy.
- With Brown Paper Tickets, you and your customers are constantly marketed to, before and after the event. The Brown Paper Tickets branding and logo appears on everything, including the confirmation emails and tickets.
Event Smart vs. Brown Paper Tickets—Which is Right for Your Event Business?
Every business is different, so you will need to carefully consider the factors above to make your decision. In general, if you are still testing your event concept and don’t want to commit to understanding the process, or don’t think your event will happen again, an event ticketing platform like Brown Paper Tickets might be a great place to start. You can always upgrade to Event Smart later.
On the other hand, if you are concerned by the risks inherent with event ticketing platforms, or plan to sell over $100,000 in event tickets, then it’s best to go with a dedicated event website. If you’re still not sure if Event Smart is right for you, then here are 19 ways Smart is better than Brite 😉
Start a 14 day Free Trial and start selling tickets for free with Event Smart: