PORTFOLIO CASE STUDY
A Horse With No Name
An online ticket-sales webshop for a theatre production, without middlemen and with a smart solution for automatic ticket processing.
WEBSITE IMPRESSIONS
An overview of the webshop with ticket-sales functionality
Homepage
Sleek design with clear branding and a direct call-to-action for ticket sales
Account management
User-friendly dashboard for customers with orders and password management
Login page
Clean login page with access to personal tickets and downloads
Year
2021
Project type
Ticket-sales Webshop
Technology
WordPress, WooCommerce
About the project
A Horse With No Name was built in 2021 as an online webshop for selling tickets to a theatre production. The client needed a website with clear instructions for buying tickets to their show "A Horse With No Name".
The tickets differed in location, price and schedules. The goal was to eliminate the middleman by having no commission fees, so that tickets could be sold directly to the audience.
The website was built with a purchased theme that I use often. I won't name it for competitive reasons, but it has low costs compared to most WordPress plugin bundles. It costs around €40 for a complete package that I have a lot of experience with and is recommended when requesting a website from me.
Biggest Challenge
The hardest part of this website was finding a way to inform people that they had successfully purchased a ticket. The webshop was built with WooCommerce, which has 'pro' features for ticket sales that are a bit too expensive for a small business.
If you want people to be able to choose their seats in a theatre, you need plugins like Event Tickets Plus or The Events Calendar. Both are perfect for large projects, but not cost-effective for smaller shows.
The solution:
Use standard WooCommerce without expensive plugins
Set products as 'virtual' for different locations and times
Generate unique QR codes per ticket, linked to the SKU number
Link downloads to schedules and locations per ticket
Custom code in functions.php for automatic ticket acceptance after purchase
This solution offered all the functionality of expensive plugins, but at a fraction of the cost. Customers got immediate access after payment to their unique tickets with QR codes that they could download and print or show on their phone at the entrance.
Technical Details
Result & Impact
Direct sales
No middlemen
Cost-effective
€40 theme instead of expensive plugins
Unique QR codes
Automatically generated
The end result was a fully functional ticket-sales webshop that offered all the required functionality without the high costs of premium plugins. By creatively using standard WooCommerce features and custom code, the client could sell tickets with unique QR codes, automatic confirmations and downloadable PDF tickets - all for a fraction of what enterprise solutions would cost. The website ran successfully throughout the show period in 2021.
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