Exciting news for event planners in India! Oveit has joined hands with PhonePe, the fastest growing payment provider in India, a platform used by 500 millions of users across the country. This integration brings a world of convenience to event management.
The Power of PhonePe Integration for India Blockchain Week:
To integrate and launch PhonePe payments we’ve worked closely with the amazing team at India Blockchain Week (IBW). With IBW showcasing the pinnacle of blockchain and web3 events in India, this integration brings convenience to participants and helps streamline payments through India’s UPI.
India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) is a real-time payment system that enables instant money transfer between bank accounts using a mobile platform. It allows users to link multiple bank accounts to a single mobile app and facilitates seamless fund transfers between individuals, merchants, and businesses. UPI operates 24/7 and is known for its simplicity, convenience, and security in conducting digital transactions. It has revolutionized the way payments are made in India, offering a user-friendly interface and promoting cashless transactions across the country.
As IBW aims to be at the forefront of innovation and technology, our collaboration with PhonePe aligns perfectly, offering a sophisticated payment solution that complements the groundbreaking nature of the event. By integrating PhonePe into the registration and ticketing process, Oveit ensures that the IBW experience remains smooth, secure, and cutting-edge.
What It Means for Event Planners:
Smooth Transactions: Attendees can now effortlessly buy tickets and make payments using PhonePe, streamlining the event experience.
More Reach: By tapping into PhonePe’s massive user base, Oveit is giving your event wider exposure and making it easier for attendees to pay.
Security & Speed: Trustworthy transactions are crucial. PhonePe offers robust security measures, ensuring peace of mind for both you and your attendees.
Insights at a Glance: Access real-time transaction data, simplifying your financial tracking and planning.
With PhonePe’s integration into Oveit’s payment gateways, event planners across India gain a powerful tool to elevate their events. Say hello to streamlined payments, enhanced user experiences, and a seamless event journey for both planners and attendees.
Oveit and PhonePe are now shaping the future of event registration and payments, one seamless transaction at a time.
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.
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.
Let’s say you want to start event registrations for your virtual or in-person event. You’ve decided to use an awesome event registration software, Oveit . But now the big question – how to start event registration?
First of all, thank you for choosing us. This is going to be as easy as it can get. At the end you will start registering visitors free of charge and receive payments in your account instantly.
If you need a video tutorial, we made one you can see below. Otherwise – keep on reading this post.
Let’s get started.
A checklist on how to start event registration
The first thing you will see when you start your account with Oveit is a short checklist with the things you need to do before starting registering visitors to your event.
It looks like this:
A checklist on how to start event registration with Oveit
There’s basically 3 things you need to do to start your event registration. They are the things you see above:
Set up billing information: this is your company or individual details. Oveit is a special software that allows you to sell tickets directly to your customers. This means they will need to know who they’re buying things from. This is the section where you’ll be setting this information in. Don’t worry – you only set it once.
Set up a payment processor: A payment processor is a company, like PayPal and Stripe that helps you receive payments instantly, directly into your account. If you have a PayPal, Stripe or Crypto account, this is where you set it up. This is a very important part of how to start event registration, if you’re planning to receive payments for your event.
Create an event: This part is self-explanatory. You will have to enter some details about your event, like name and the date it takes place in, set up tickets and share the registration link with your potential visitors.
As you notice above, there’s a fourth step as well. This is the “select pricing plan”. By default, Oveit automatically registers you with the free event registration plan, which allows you to register up to 300 visitors per event, on an unlimited number of events, free of any Oveit charge. If you receive payments, you will be charged a commission by PayPal or Stripe.
If you checked all details above, you’re basically set and you know how to start event registration for all your next events.
However, Oveit is a powerful tool, with extensive options that allow you to create the perfect event. Let’s have a look at some of the most important ones:
Your dashboard
Once you’ve started your first event you will get access to your Dashboard. Here you will see an aggregate of all your ticket sales and registrations, once they start happening.
If you don’t have any events the first thing you should do is click on “Create event”
How to start event registration: Your new event
Now, let’s move on to creating an actual event. You can either click on the button My events and you will be taken to the Event Management chart or you can click on Create an Event button and this will take you to the core part of Oveit.
You’ll see that creating an event is extremely easy. You have 4 main steps and two other ones in case you want to use two additional functions: Registration forms and Badge design (these are more advanced topics on how to start event registration).
The first step is entitled General Settings. Here you set up general details on your event, things such as the event’s name, start and end date and where it takes place. By the way – if you host a virtual event – just add “Virtual” or “Online” in the Location/address input.
There’s several other things you can fill in. An example would be “No seating”. This means you will not have a seating map. If you need a seating map just choose “With seating” and find out here how to set up a seating chart.
You will need to add a start and end date for your event. If you’re selling tickets for a venue, such as a theme park that sells tickets all year round, just tick “Perpetual”. This will allow visitors to buy tickets whenever they feel like visiting you.
There’s several other more advanced features, such as registration forms or badges. If you need these, be sure to book a guided tour of these features.
Adding tickets to my event registration
Next steps on how to start event registration guide: tickets.
You can split the types of event registrations you will accept with different types of tickets. Oveit allows all sorts of discounts and addons with your ticket but you only need to know one thing. At its basics you will just need to add one ticket, free or paid and click “Save”. This takes you to a list where you can add more tickets by clicking “New ticket category”
How to start event registration – adding tickets
Sometimes you may need a more advanced ticketing setup when you start event registration. If so – check out our post on advanced ticket types or contact us for a guided tour or more advanced features and benefits.
How to start event registration: checkout settings
Checkout settings – default options are usually left unchanged
There’s a lot of options on this page. Please don’t get confused. We’ve set up the page in such a way that our default check marks do the work for you. You can contact us if you need a more in-depth explanation or more advanced configuration.
Usually, what you want to customise is the follow up email subject and content. Basically your message to your future visitors:
Confirmation email on event registration
This is where you customise what your visitors will receive in their email after they registered.
Above you can see a chart with variables and their description. The computer-code looking things are tags you can use to personalise the email content. For example: if you’re holding a virtual event you can add [tickets_codes] in the email body to display the registration code your guests will use to access your virtual event.
Finally, you have the order confirmation page. Here you can opt to send a Thank you message that will be displayed after the customer has purchased the ticket or you can send him to a custom created URL on your website. To do that, just add the link and all is done.
How to preview your event registration
The final event registration setup step is the Preview section below:
Step no. 4 allows you to preview your registration widget prior to publishing it. You can play around with colors and fonts and brand the event registration according to your wishes.
Hit publish when you are ready to start registration and you will be taken to…
Payment processor integration
If you haven’t done so already, this is where you connect your payment processor. This is usually PayPal or Stripe. This way we can help you receive payments instantly. It’s very, very simple:
If you use PayPal: press Activate PayPal integration: In the next step you will add your PayPal email address and name. This helps Oveit to know where to send funds paid by your customers.
If you use Stripe: press “Activate Stripe integration”. This takes you to your Stripe account where you can check whether you want to safely accept payments with Oveit.
All of our transactions are handled by our partners (e.g. PayPal and Stripe). Your money or your customers payment data is never stored with us.
If you haven’t done so already, you will need to fill in your billing information. As you sell directly to your visitors, they will need to know who they’re buying from. Oveit issues invoices for all purchases on your behalf. Here’s what you need to fill in, only once, as you start selling:
If this is a bit too complicated when you start your event, just reach out to us and let’s set up a call where we can guide you through the setup process, step by step. One of our customer success staff will help you get everything set up.
Final step: Copy, paste and embed your event in your website
The last step: start your event registration. All you have to do now is get the event on your website and make it available to customers or point them to your event registration on Oveit. To do that, click on ‘My events’ in the bar, right near the Oveit logo. You will see a list of your events. You can start your registration in two ways:
Point visitors to your event registration page on Oveit. Click the “Preview” link and share the URL with your visitors on social media or your website.
Embed the registration on your website: you will notice that every event has an “</> Embed” button below it. Click on that button and you’ll find two embed codes (one available for light theme and one for dark theme – the theme refers to your website visual theme). Just copy the code you need and paste it on your website. The embed is responsive and works with most website management software so you won’t have any problems putting it on your website in just a couple of seconds.
And that’s it! You managed to start your event registration and start receiving event registrations. Now visitors can register, purchase tickets and attend your in-person or virtual event.
There is no doubt that we all miss our normal lives and activities. A year into the pandemic and most of us still live under imposed restrictions. Well, the good news is that part of our in-person activities which are put on pause as we speak can be replicated in a virtual environment, even when we talk about a virtual wine tasting.
In this post, we’re going to place the focus on virtual wine tastings. The end result replicates really well in-person wine tastings but setting up such an experience is slightly different. For those that would rather experience new wines from the comfort of their own homes, a virtual wine tasting can be a great alternative.
If you are thinking to host a virtual wine tasting, here are some tips that will help you create a memorable experience.
What is a Virtual Wine Tasting?
Before diving into what it takes to host a virtual wine tasting, let’s begin by briefly describing this relatively new concept. Well, you can think of it as a regular wine tasting (in-person), where participants taste and learn about different wine selections from a winery. While the purpose of both in-person and virtual wine tastings is the same, the main difference lies in how this action is performed. Instead of visiting a winery, the winery comes to your door. In both cases, wineries take care of the whole experience. Their duty is to coordinate the wine shipment, making sure that it arrives at your location in time. Then, organizers will share further details on how to access the virtual wine tasting, including platform capabilities for a better experience.
Date & Time for your Virtual Wine Tasting
Well, instead of deciding a date & time yourself, provide your audience with the option to do it themselves. To avoid the back and forth texting to find out when everyone’s free, consider using a tool such as Pick. This app integrates with Gmail and Office 365. It simply shows those times when everyone is available. Based on that, you can choose a date & time that hopefully works for everybody that’s interested to attend.
Provide clear tasting instructions ahead of time
To make sure that your wines are enjoyed properly by your audience, provide clear instructions on how the virtual tasting should be approached. When is the right time for your guests to open their wine bottles? Should they preserve the wines at a certain temperature? What about using a clean glass for each wine? Should they taste the wines in a specific order?
This might seem like a basic piece of information, but communicating it ahead of time can only make you look more organized and professional. If you ship wine kits before the actual virtual wine tasting, it might be a good idea to include those instructions in there.
Choose a tasting theme
It’s always recommended to decide upon a theme beforehand. In the case of virtual wine testings, a theme translates into deciding on particular wines to taste. These are some common themes when it comes to wine-tasting:
Regional
A regional wine tasting theme brings together wines from a particular region. For instance, no other wines are allowed besides those coming from the Veneto region of Italy or any other region.
Vertical
A vertical tasting requires a bit more effort since it includes the wine of a producer across a range of years. The key element for a proper vertical tasting is to assure that the wine bottles were stored properly. However, if you manage to put together this type of tasting, the outcome can be great, since your audience can learn about a winemaker’s style, getting familiar with the various vintage styles and how those changed during the years.
Horizontal
This is a common theme for both virtual and in-person wine tastings. It involves wines that are produced in the same year, from different producers. It gives more flexibility since all new releases can be included.
Blind Tasting
This one works best when comparing different types of grapes, like Pinot Grigio, Shiraz, Chardonnay, or Pinot Noir. It can be used as an ice breaker for virtual wine tastings with many participants. The wine labels are covered and participants need to guess the country, grape, and even the price range based on the taste of wine.
As the virtual wine tasting host, make sure to choose a setting without distractions. If you go live from your home, tidy up in advance. Run some tests in advance and check your internet connection, camera, and microphone. If you have the option to host the virtual wine tasting inside an actual winery, good for you. That will only make things more fun for your audience. You can surprise them with a virtual tour of the winery before the actual tasting begins, sharing with them your favorite parts of it.
Custom shipments for your audience
Why not create special packages for your audience? An in-person wine tasting takes care of all the necessary supplies. To make it easier, enable your audience to order their wine supplies in advance. Inside each package, you can include different wines to be tested, food pairings, and maybe some wine glasses as well.
To present the available packages more engaging instead of simply posting them on your website, why not create a live shopping session? For instance, with Streams.live, our live stream shopping and virtual event software, creating a live shopping session is as easy as possible. It allows your viewers to purchase different promoted packages, straight from the video. The tool comes with a chat & questions feature, creating engagement and allowing you as the presenter to answer incoming questions in real-time when it matters the most.
Well, you’ve taken care of all the small details. Now it’s time to choose your technology. This might be the most important step of the process when hosting a virtual wine tasting. In the end, this is where your audience will interact, exchange thoughts, and experience all the hard work that you’ve put in.
A large number of virtual wine tastings take place on Zoom. It is indeed a reliable and user-friendly video conferencing tool. However, if you want to go that extra mile and create a more personalized experience, closer to your brand and believes, you might consider as well Oveit and Streams.live. Our solutions are interconnected. Oveit is our event registration software, that allows you to register attendees, customize confirmation emails, send out electronic tickets with unique access codes, collect valuable information through fully customizable registration forms and receive direct payments into your account once an order is placed.
In summary
Who said that in-person wine tastings can’t be replicated in a virtual environment? Social distancing doesn’t exist in the online world and opportunities are limitless. As physical locations, including wineries, remain closed due to the pandemic, events such as virtual wine tastings are a great way to keep a business alive. It is a new way of interacting for all of us, so don’t be afraid to try it out. It won’t be perfect from your first try, which is absolutely normal. One last piece of advice is to always ask for feedback. Your audience is in the right position to provide you with constructive feedback after each virtual wine tasting.
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