An online booking and payment system for a sporting event

[RabbieBurns]

Our school organizes an inter-school sailing event that takes place annually. It has about 600 competitors from across the country and currently the teacher who manages it gets snowed under with enrollment forms, payment cheques etc, and organizing competitors into categories etc.

 

Im thinking we could set up some sort of online website where folk can self-enroll, pay their fees online, and it will automatically organize the competitors into categories based on what they enter in the online forms.

 

Is there an existing system that could be tweaked for this? Or am I looking at paying a website company to design a bespoke system with an E-Commerce shopping cart component?

[howartp]

Our school organizes an inter-school sailing event that takes place annually. It has about 600 competitors from across the country and currently the teacher who manages it gets snowed under with enrollment forms, payment cheques etc, and organizing competitors into categories etc.

 

Im thinking we could set up some sort of online website where folk can self-enroll, pay their fees online, and it will automatically organize the competitors into categories based on what they enter in the online forms.

 

Is there an existing system that could be tweaked for this? Or am I looking at paying a website company to design a bespoke system with an E-Commerce shopping cart component?

Hi Rabbie,

 

It depends how much clever organising is required by the system, but...

 

We use TicketSource: the free web-based box office system for our theatre tickets. It allows you to take bookings (aka enrollment forms), payments, and ask an additional question during booking. You can export the final bookings to CSV (Excel) so if you only need a single 'category' field (extra question) that the competitor fills in when they enroll/book, you can open the data in Excel and sort/filter by that column then proceed from there.

 

TicketSource is free to sign up and look around, and it only charges a small fee per paid ticket, so it won't cost you hundreds of pounds for a system designed to be used weekly/monthly that you only use once per annum. If you opt to pay the fee from your proceeds (say you receive £4.50 for a £5 'ticket'/'enrollment') then you offset that against the time and energy saved by the teacher... (The alternative is charging the fee to the competitor (they pay £5.50 for your £5 ticket)).

 

Is this any help?

 

You can see South Craven School tickets from TicketSource | Buy tickets online to see what the booking process for non-seated events (ie '100 tickets, first come first served') looks like; the Pink Event doesn't go on sale yet so you can't see our seated event.

 

Peter

[garethm]

Could always have a look at Eventbrite? Used that in the past - it's pretty good

[timbo343]

Have a look at amiando.com.

[dhicks]

We use TicketSource

 

I saw this thread and was about to recommend TicketSource too - if they don't have the exact features you need you could always ask their advice as they seem like they know what they're doing and might be able to implement a feature for you.