Mike Dragan is the cofounder and CEO of Oveit and works daily on providing better tools for live experiences. Mike has a background in computer science and loves building digital products.
As Oveit progressed we added more and more features. We started with a simple idea of making event registration simpler, help event organizers receive payments instantly and embed everything on their website.
As we progressed and crossed our first thousand users we saw more and more options we needed to add.
We understood different registration periods may have different pricing points. We saw the need to limit potential sales to an upper limit of tickets per buyer (avoiding scalpers and such). We then discovered the whole idea of group buying and we added bulk sales options. Some of our customers wanted to extend the usage of a simple ticket beyond just access and we created addons. We even added a digital wallet you can use to pay for goods in a venue and around it. To solve fraud we created smart tickets. Calendar based tickets were added to cover multi-day events. And more…
So, inch by inch, we got to this:
And this …
And a lot longer setup section. I just cropped the upper part. Imagine you had to scroll to find the save button on a ticket. On a desktop.
Meanwhile, most of our starting users wanted to set up a ticket or two, set up a price and start their event registration.
The power users, midsized and large events, needed the full range of our features and sometimes even more.
So how could we have our cake and eat it too? How can we set up a simple basic ticket setup option but retain all of our features?
We thought a lot about this and discovered that:
We needed to simplify the ticket listing page and minimize the ticket groups feature. So we removed the large group input which served a minimal role. We updated the interface for our users to just drag and drop tickets and it would form a group. We changed the wording based on input from our customers;
We kept only the minimal options visible in the basic ticket setup. We now ask for a ticket name and a price (if the registration is not free). All other (many) options are now part of the … well … options panel. Just expand it and you’ll see them ordered by most commonly used ones.
This is how the ticket listing section looks now:
Oveit tickets section
And this is how the ticket setup modal looks like:
Setting up a ticket is simpler in Oveit
The expanded options are visible at a click or two:
Ticketing options
Much easier to follow, right? If you want to play around with it just head over to your Events section and add a new ticket.
We’d love to hear your take on it. If there’s anything you think we can improve, just schedule a call with us here.
Some of our customers mentioned there is something missing in Oveit. A solution for multi-multi-day events. And one for venues that sell tickets indefinitely. Turns out the solution is the same.
Here’s how it started: if you set up a two or three day conference there is a simple way to set up your ticketing process. Actually there are more. You can add day tickets or you can add packages composed of multi-days tickets. You can even use our addon feature to help visitors create their own special kind of ticket package.
But what if you want to set up an event that will happen three times a week for the next 3 weeks? Or set up ticketing for a venue that sells tickets everyday, all year round? With our previous system you’d have to set up as many ticket types as days available in the event. There were some workarounds but it was messy and error prone.
Enter: the calendar ticket
To solve this issue we created a new way of setting up tickets. With some simple rules you can create everything you can imagine for a recurring type of event.
You can set up daily tickets, time slots, tickets that sell every few days starting at a certain date and ending at another. You can choose specific dates where the ticket will be sold.
And what’s even better – it will magically appear in a simple to use calendar interface that you can use on Oveit.com or embed in your website.
Setting up a calendar based ticket
What do you think – are you ready to give it a try? Head over to your Oveit dashboard, set up a new event, check “perpetual” at the date happening and a new option will show up in your ticket options: “Calendar”.
Once you open the “Calendar” option you will notice you can set the ticket to be appear:
Everyday (you can set up start and end dates)
On specific days (e.g. Monday and Wednesday)
On specific dates (e.g. Aug 12, 2024 and Aug 15, 2024)
Choose one of the options, tweak it a little bit by using the advanced settings and you are ready to go.
It’s been 18 hours since I’ve boarded my first flight. Meanwhile I switched two times. We’ve finally landed. After passing through customs I look for my name. Someone should be waiting for me. I see him. He is a middle aged man holding a tablet with my name on it.
We get to the parking lot and board the fully electric car with a brand logo I don’t recognize. As my host mentions, the government subsidized 50% of its cost.
As we drive to the hotel I look outside and I see hundreds upon hundreds of apartment blocks, many of which are still being built.
It’s July 2018 and I’ve just arrived in the city I’ll call home for the next 10 days, as I network and showcase our technology to local partners. It’s Hangzhou, China. This is where my view on payments tech will change forever.
The Hangzhou skyline
Electric cars and QR codes
The “small city of four million citizens” was a treat in many ways. Our hosts showcased some of the most advanced Chinese tech companies as well as traditional buildings and artefacts dating back to 2000 BC.
Now, 4 years after Oveit showcased its edge payments technology at the tech conference in Hangzhou, two things still linger on my mind.
The first is just how many electric cars, bikes and scooters roamed the streets. At the time Tesla was hot and growing but not nearly as big as it is right now.
At the time traditional western car manufacturers were still debating whether they should or should not switch to electric. EVs were still a huge gamble. It surprised me to find out that more than 100 electric car brands were active in the Chinese market, with many others providing charging stations, batteries and parts. All the taxi drivers switched to electric cars. It was partly due to cost savings, partly due to the government subsidies and strategic push.
NIO flagship store in Hangzhou. What was about to be unveiled was the EP9, which would become one of the fastest electric cars in the world.
The second big surprise was payments. Specifically QR code payments. One of the companies we visited just passed both VISA and Mastercard in terms of the number of transactions processed. As it turns out, that company’s growth would be stifled in a few years but at the time the energy and enthusiasm was something you can feel in the air. That company was Ant Financial, the financial arm of AliBaba.
Even though the future of the company and its prominent founder remains unclear, one thing is for sure. The total electronic payments market in China kept on growing following my visit and exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic. Tools such as AliPay and WeChat Pay were at the core of this growth and transformation. Their choice in payment processing interfaces was a peculiar technology: QR codes.
Our visit at Ant Financial. Standing in front of the ant: me.
In the western world we use different interfaces for online vs offline transactions but both are still governed by the credit and debit card. With the appearance of Apple Pay and GPay, a lot of these payments migrated to the smartphone. Many, but not nearly all. We still use debit cards, credit cards, bank transfers, cash and oh, dear … checks.
This was not the case in Hangzhou. From shopping for clothes to food, from paying your bills and taxi rides to the vegetable market, everyone used an electronic means of payment I found a bit funny at first: QR codes. For me they were a technology that failed to leave its mark in the marketing and advertising industry. What I failed to realize at first was that these were not your run of the mill QRs. They were dynamic, would run on basically any smartphone or tablet, were impossible to fake or copy, secure and easy to use.
QR codes were scanned via mobile apps and the user paid directly from her bank account, simply pointing the camera at the vendor and confirming the transaction. There was no need to carry multiple cards, each secured and processed through a specialized POS. Everyone paid and accepted payments using their smartphones quickly, safely and instantly.
Cash, especially foreign currencies, was discouraged. For some reason – I needed to exchange a $100 bill and it took me three hours to finalize the transaction. Even as a foreigner cash was a no-go.
What did I learn? It was a simple but powerful lesson: that payments in the way we grew accustomed to were now obsolete. The old way was effectively dead. Banking institutions, slow to innovate were still issuing plastic cards (so hot in the 80s) and hardly adapted to the new globally connected world.
The world changed and we, as a company, were part of the wave of changes that were transforming the world of finance and payments. Our story involved a particular market where we were good but in time we decided we want to become the best: cashless payments for live experiences. This now ranges from events and live entertainment venues to travel and hospitality.
The system we showcased in Hangzhou, our edge payments system, went on to power large festivals and venues, with tens of thousands of visitors. As the pandemic reshuffled the world of live experiences, we continued to innovate and ride the wave of change.
Recently, our R&D started playing around and found out what could happen when you combine our existing technology with the decentralized wonder called blockchain. We discovered an interesting concept that we now believe has the potential to transform the world of payments. Just like the QR codes I saw in Hangzhou, it looks and feels peculiar as a payment technology. Enter the NFT.
NFT payments – beyond fancy monkeys
NFTs are self contained digital ownership contracts. When minted to a crypto wallet, the assets this NFT holds are transferred to said wallet. These assets can range from photos, songs, movies to games and more.
But the NFT can also work as a holder of prepacked benefits and digital wallets, holding value, both fungible and non fungible. When combined with the right infrastructure, the NFTs become a payment technology.
In our case we discovered we can connect the NFT to the addons we developed, as well as the virtual wallet that our users pay and accept payments with. The usage can range from prepackaging a beer and a t-shirt to a concert to your next travel package, containing your plane ticket, payments in the city, access to attractions and local businesses or a hotel stay, even when you travel to Hangzhou.
What it can also hold is a virtual wallet. The wallet can be pre topped up, connected to a debit or credit card and can be used to pay. The NFT can become a payment technology, with properties unlike anything before, which we’ll discuss later. All this when the vendors use our Oveit Pay.
NFT payments – beyond bank accounts and transfers
As it turns out, the payments underlying AliPay and WeChat in China, as well as the likes of Revolut and Kash App are interfaces to systems that hold funds and rely on the traditional banking system. However, building upon the classical approach, they have built their own checks and balances systems to operate a secondary payment system. This new layer improves the payment speed, scalability, makes payments more usable and friendly and makes microtransactions possible.
However, operating these systems comes at a cost. These systems handle real money so their infrastructure needs to be maintained constantly, supervised and updated.
At a certain point it’s harder to keep systems secure than it is to build new features like loans, social payments and more.
As it turns out, you don’t have to do that. There is already an existing technology out there that enables fast and secure transactions, without any single point of failure: the blockchain, in its many incarnations.
There are also tools users can tap into to connect to this new technology and purchase, transact and store virtual value: the crypto wallet.
The blockchain ecosystem was in need of some sort of mechanism to point to digital value and move it from one user to another, securely. This new tool emerged in the past two years. It can do anything a bank account does plus what a card and a swift transfer can do. And a bit more. It’s the NFT.
Unlike the wallet, the NFT can hold multiple types of value abstractions. It can be transferred, it can be sold or gifted. Moreover – it can be governed by clear, transparent rules at the time of the minting. These rules are written and exposed to the whole world to audit. They are all set up in what is called a smart contract.
However, there is some confusion when it comes to the general outlook on NFTs and whether they are a useful technology or just a pump and dump scheme. The confusion is the following:
Think of NFTs as a preloaded debit card, with a bank account attached to it, with all sorts of benefits you can claim in the real world or online. It can have money stored in this bank account, it can have membership programs for all sorts of brands and communities. This card can be safely transferred or sold at a profit. It can be used as a collateral. It’s all the financial systems you know, all baked into one. And a bit more as it can be transferred, sold, traced, governed by rules and it doesn’t depend on any one system to run.
So far all we saw was the pretty picture placed on top of the card. But the bank account it was linked to was empty. There were no loaded benefits. No one built membership programs. There were no places you could use it to gain real benefits, in the real world, online or … the Metaverse. People just plastered pretty photos on it and sold them.
This is where we are right now. As with my time in Hangzhou, we all see the photo (back then it was the QR code). We don’t see what’s behind the photo and where it can lead. In the short time we had to get accustomed to NFTs we didn’t see how we could use them to transform payments. We only saw the surface.
Glancing beyond the monkey photos and the doodles, we can see the future of how NFTs can be used for payments as well as value storage and transfer. We can see the financial system moving from a single, monolithic, architecture which is old and slow to adopt change. The system is in the midst of a transformation into a new vibrant system that puts humans and human communities at its core.
Just like our existing civilization, it all started with photos of ape-like creatures doing stuff.
Meanwhile, at Oveit, we are putting this vision to the test with our very own NFT tickets.
With all its ups and downs, promises, hopes and disappointments, there is no doubt Web3 is here to stay and transform the world. The live entertainment industry is no exception – it is getting its fair share of disruption from Web3. As Oveit is one of the pioneers and leaders in the NFT ticketing space, we have decided to dive deeper and explain how you can use NFT tickets to build a better experience, connect better with your audience and solve problems you previously couldn’t solve.
But first – what are NFTs?
The most common misconception around NFTs is that they are expensive pieces of digital art. Well, they are that too. The most expensive NFT, a series of NFTs actually, called “The Merge” was sold for $91.8 million and was acquired by 28,983 collectors, snapping up 312,686 “units of mass”. This sale put the artist, Pak, at the forefront of the highest selling living artists.
So – are NFTs artwork? Are they cryptocurrencies? Yes and not really. You see, NFTs are digital ownership contracts. The ownership relationship is usually between a crypto wallet and a piece of digital content. So far the most popular form this digital content was expressed in was a piece of digital artwork. However, this is just the beginning. Let’s see how you can use NFTs to up you experiential game:
NFT ticketing can offer visitors valuable digital collectibles
Outside of the hype, there are great reasons to test NFT ticketing as an alternative to “classic” digital tickets. First and foremost, a lot of your visitors will attach a sentimental value to the visit to your event. Adding an authentic digital collectible to tickets may make your visitors feel they get more than they paid for and can add to their digital identity.
In the past, great experiences provided their visitors with all sorts of physical mementos, like a t-shirt, the physical ticket design, a wristband and more. However, t-shirts get torn, tickets get lost and at some point you do have to take wristbands off, no matter how much you enjoyed the experience. With NFT tickets your visitors can always have an authentic, beautiful memory of the visit to your event, one they will not lose and it will only get more valuable with time. Speaking of valuable collectibles:
NFTs can become digital collectible with increasing value which you can tap into
Not only can you provide NFTs together with your tickets but you can also tap into the secondary market for these collectibles.
Whenever an NFT is deployed to the blockchain, such an NFT is governed by a special kind of program designed to run perpetually on the blockchain: a smart contract. This contract can govern all sorts of behaviors your buyers might have.
If, for example, you want to get a cut of all future resales (a royalty) the smart contract can be programmed to send back a certain percentage to your own crypto wallet whenever someone resells the NFT ticket you have issued. The best thing – you don’t have to do anything for this to happen. The system will automatically send a certain percentage on each resale.
The fact that NFTs are actually self contained programs running independent of your activity or your ticketing provider helps solve one of the biggest problems (and opportunities) in the live entertainment industry: the secondary market.
Use NFT ticketing to handle secondary market sales and combat scalping
Scalping is as old as ticket sales. I’m pretty sure that whenever one of Shakespeare’s plays got popular in The Globe, just south of the Thames, there would be scalping involved. Some people would buy a lot of tickets when they went on sale with the hope of reselling them at a profit on the night of the premiere.
For centuries the best way to limit and keep scalping in check was prohibiting resale, which is effective to a certain degree. However – the need for a secondary market cannot be ignored. As the likes of StubHub have shown, people will want to resell their tickets. A better way to govern resells has to be implemented.
With the multitude of ticket sellers and types of tickets, this was not doable until blockchain ticketing technology was introduced in the ticketing industry by the likes of Oveit. Now the secondary market can be governed through NFT ticketing. Event promoters, artists and fans alike can work together to find the best way to handle sales while limiting potential losses to artists and promoters, as well as horribly inflated ticket fees to end consumers.
Use NFT ticketing to cross the boundaries of virtual and in-person events
Whereas in-person events can only happen at given times and in specific event venues, virtual events can be asynchronous and can be accessed from all over the world. The same ticket can be used to enter a real-world event but at the same time can be used digitally to access VR or AR worlds where specific experiences can be accessed.
You might think – can’t I use an e ticket to do that? Not necessarily – the world is quickly moving toward more immersive experiences where the ticket is more like a virtual passport rather than an access control token. With the NFT ticket you got at the Disney World you may be able to interact with virtual branded worlds, play games, earn rewards and more. For this to happen, the ticket will work as an open-access identifier you can use across all sorts of experiences. Blockchain is perfect for that.
Pack value into tickets, allow them to be transmitted
For a very long, long time the ticket was a simple access tool. It would allow you to enter a certain location. As the world of experiences has evolved, so has the usage of such tools. We at Oveit have always been at the forefront of innovation in the field.
For us, the NFT ticket is a way to store and access value in the form of non fungible as well as fungible tokens. Fungible value is the value you can spend in a certain venue. For example – $100 worth of purchases you can spend at your favorite festival. Non-fungible is something that cannot be split or exchanged. For example a t-shirt, a few special rides you want to access, meet and greet with your favorite star, a burger or three beverages.
With NFT tickets visitors can tailor their own personalized experience. If for some reason they may not make it to the event or venue, they can resell this experience and you, the event organizer, can get an additional fee, providing the same experience.
These are just 5 ways you can use NFT tickets to transform your event experience, your theme park visit or your tourist resort visit. We’re sure there’s plenty more we didn’t mention. What is your favorite?
With Oveit you can create advanced Ticket types. The first thing you do is set your ticket type name. You can set names such as VIP Area, Entry ticket, Early bird ticket etc. Obviously, the ticket type name is your choice and varies according to the events. You might want to create special prices for different areas in your venue, so you can name one ticket type Area A and another Area B. Again, this is your choice to make.
Now, you can make a short description of the ticket (300 characters). Here you can add information about the ticket that might be relevant to the attendee. This is optional but sometimes it’s a good thing to have, as you might want to offer the attendee some extra features on that respective ticket. Or it may be a multiple day pass for a larger event and the description can indicate the events where he is allowed to participate.
Next is the ticket price. You can set up the ticket price in USD or other, local currencies. Nevertheless, if you enter the ticket price “0”, that means the event is free of charge and you can go on using Oveit just as a registration tool for the attendees.
After you set up the price, you can tick an option to include the sales fees in the final price, or opt to add it to your ticket price. You will see the buyer’s final price (and our fee) and you will see how much you will receive in the end.
You will see a Bulk sales options bar. This is a nice feature in case you want to create special offers for a specific ticket category. Let’s say that your ticket price is 20 USD. Now, you can make a special offer and sell 2 tickets for the price of one. Just select: 2 tickets cost 20 USD. And the offer is active. Simple and fast. Of course you can include our processing fee in the price or add it, just like in the case of normal tickets. And you can also add more promotions: 5 tickets cost X USD, 10 tickets cost X USD… and all the way to 15 tickets. If you want to remove a bulk sales offer just click delete and you’re done.
Next you can set up the timetable of the sales for this ticket type. Set the starting date and hour for the ticket sales and set the closing date and hour. If you want to sell this type of ticket until the event day, just leave the fields empty and Oveit will set it up automatically.
You can customise your event ticketing process by setting specific Series and Numbers for the tickets, if you wish to do so. Otherwise, just let Oveit work its magic and generate the ticket ID’s automatically. Save the ticket and proceed. You can add more tickets, edit your created tickets and associate the tickets with the event venue.
If you’ve previously set up a venue seating chart, you can associate the tickets you’ve just created with a certain seating section, row or seat. Once you click on the Associate Tickets you will be taken to a new window where you will see the seating chart of the venue that you’ve previously created. To associate tickets with seats is extremely simple. Just click on the ticket type and then click on the seat section… and that’s it. If you want to block some areas of the seating chart, just click on ‘Unassociated’ and then on the respective area, and it’s blocked. You can do that while sales are going on, as you might want to change ticket prices or you might want to assign some seats to other categories or even give invitations/vouchers for those seats. So with just a couple of clicks you can do your seat management on the fly with this Assign seats function.
That’s it. How are you going to use the advanced ticket types?
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