Not just a one-act play, TicketPrinting.com is developing new services for event organizers beyond printing and selling their tickets. Building on the passion fans have for events ranging from rock concerts to kick-boxing tournaments, it’s also providing its clients with event-themed merchandise and planning to launch white-label retail e-commerce services, CEO Lance Trebesch says.
TicketPrinting, which launched online in 1997 and is based in Bozeman, MT, has close to $8 million in annual revenue. Growth has been steady over the years, Trebesch says, and he expects it to pick up as he expands into new ventures in the United States, Europe and Asia.
The company’s core business started with letting event organizers order tickets and related items online for shipment to their event location, and by 2010 offered online ticket through TicketRiver.com. Trebesch and his staff developed their own e-commerce sites with Microsoft Corp.’s .Net and SQL server technology.
Going forward, however, Trebesch says he’ll meet what he sees as an increasing demand for products that event organizers either give away or sell to event goers. “In addition to the ability to buy and print tickets online, now event organizers can go online to buy merchandise that matches what they’re doing,” he says. The company caters to event organizers in sports, entertainment and non-profit organizations’ fundraising.
Rock concert organizers, for example, may buy rubber wristbands to give away as concert memorabilia or concert T-shirts to sell as souvenirs. Organizers of fundraising walks by nonprofits, such as for cancer research, may buy T-shirts and water bottles to give to participants. In some cases, event organizers will offer their customers merchandise that promote the name of corporate benefactors. “One of our key objectives this year is to add a bunch of new promotional merchandise,” Trebesch says.
TicketPrinting is in the early stages of testing new e-commerce technology, built on .Net infrastructure, that it will use to offer event organizers a white-label e-commerce service for selling tickets and related merchandise online to their customers. The new service will provide online storefronts designed with the logos and colors of a particular event or nonprofit organization, and make them accessible through smartphones and tablets as well as desktop computers and on-site event kiosks.
For nonprofits, TicketPrinting will also provide the new e-commerce service as a sales and distribution venue that organizations will be able to operate under their own name to let their members and local chapters order products. If a local chapter of a national health care nonprofit needed to purchase items like posters for a local fundraising event, TicketPrinting would ship them the goods on behalf of the parent organization.
As TicketPrinting builds out its event merchandise sales and e-commerce services, it’s also planning to introduce similar services in several markets across Europe and Asia, Trebresch says. In the United Kingdom, for example, TicketPrinting has identified a strong demand for online ticketing services that let event organizers purchase tickets with security features embedded on tickets like holograms.
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