Every business that runs events faces the same ticketing question: use a platform like Eventbrite, build something yourself, or find a middle ground. The event could be a cookery class, a wine tasting, a business networking breakfast, a photography workshop, a craft fair, a fitness bootcamp. The product is different in every case, but the problem is the same.
Eventbrite charges between 3.7% and 6.95% per ticket, plus a flat fee per order. On a £50 workshop with 20 attendees, that’s around £75–95 in fees per event. Run 15 events a year and you’ve paid Eventbrite up to £1,400 for the privilege of selling your own tickets. The platform also owns the attendee data — emails, purchase history, the ability to recommend your event to the right people — all controlled by them, not you.
The middle ground — ticketing built directly into your own website — is increasingly the right answer for most small event businesses, and the barrier to getting there has dropped dramatically.
What makes event ticketing different from regular sales
Selling a ticket is different from selling a product in one critical way: there’s a hard capacity limit, and selling one more ticket than that limit causes real damage. Oversell a product and you have a fulfilment problem. Oversell a woodworking workshop with 12 benches and you have 13 people arriving at a room with 12 spaces, someone who paid has to leave, and the reputational fallout can last years.
Good event ticketing enforces capacity in real time. The moment ticket 12 is sold, the event shows as full. A waiting list captures anyone who tries after that, and when a cancellation comes in, the next person on the list can be offered the seat automatically. None of this requires anyone to manually monitor a spreadsheet.
Session-based ticketing: the complexity most platforms get wrong
Many event businesses don’t run a single session — they run the same event across multiple time slots. A language school running beginner classes on Tuesday evenings and Thursday mornings. A cookery school with three sittings on a Saturday. A gin distillery with a 14:00 tour and an 18:00 tasting.
Session-aware ticketing treats each slot as separate availability. A ticket for the 14:00 session doesn’t consume a seat in the 18:00 session. This sounds obvious but many basic ticketing tools get it wrong, forcing businesses to create entirely separate event listings for each time slot — a maintenance nightmare that clutters any platform listing and makes managing capacity confusing.
SiteFino’s Events & Tickets plugin handles session-based events natively. One event, multiple sessions, independent capacity tracking for each. Customers choose their slot during checkout. The business sees each session’s availability clearly.
Real-world example: a business networking series
A business networking group ran a monthly founder breakfast — 35 seats, £30 per ticket, with a guest speaker and facilitated discussion. They were using Eventbrite for ticketing and a separate email tool for attendee communications. Every month: create the Eventbrite listing, wait for tickets to sell, export a CSV, import it into their email tool, send the pre-event communications from a disconnected system.
After moving ticketing to their own SiteFino site, the whole process became one system. Tickets sell through their site. The confirmation email comes from their own domain. Attendees are on their own list. They message registered attendees directly from the same place they manage the event. The monthly fee saving was meaningful, but the real gain was owning 35 contacts per event — people who attend regularly and are their most likely customers for other offerings.
Free events need real ticketing too
A common misconception is that free events don’t need proper ticketing. They often need it more than paid events. A free event with no friction to register will have significantly more no-shows than one where someone completed a checkout flow, even without payment. The act of registering creates commitment.
Free ticketing through SiteFino captures the same attendee data, enforces the same capacity limit, and sends the same confirmation email as a paid ticket. The only difference is that the payment step is skipped. The operational benefits — knowing exactly who is coming, being able to communicate with them before the event, managing capacity — are identical.
Using real scarcity well
Event ticketing creates natural scarcity that product selling doesn’t. A specific date, a fixed number of seats, and a visible “4 tickets remaining” indicator are all accurate, factual information — not manufactured urgency. Showing them clearly on your event listing helps people make a decision.
SiteFino surfaces this automatically on your events page. As seats sell, the count updates. When an event is full, a waiting list option appears. Upcoming events are listed with their dates and remaining availability, giving the site a dynamic, active quality that a static page listing services can never have.
The communication loop: before, during, and after
The booking is only the beginning. Attendees who registered three weeks ago need a reminder a day before. If the venue changes or the agenda updates, they need to know. After the event, hosts often want to share materials, gather feedback, or promote the next date.
All of this is far easier when the ticketing lives in your own system. You have the list. You can send a targeted message to everyone registered for a specific event without exporting a CSV and importing it somewhere else. The event and its attendees are one thing, in one place, managed by you — not held in a platform you don’t control.