Our first official post this year is also to make an announcement about the release of a very important feature that we have been working on behind the covers over the latter part of 2010.  Without further ado, we are excited to announce Eventzilla’s advanced integration with PayPal!

Here is what this means..

What does it mean for me?

• If you are hosting a free event, there will be no impact
• If you are hosting a paid event and collect payments through your PayPal account, then you will no longer receive an invoice from Eventzilla to pay your Eventzilla fee. Click here to view pricing details in your currency.  The fee will be automatically deducted from your transaction in real time – thereby saving you the trouble of yet another invoice at a later date.

Does this mean that I will never receive an invoice from Eventzilla?

You will not receive an invoice if you only use your PayPal account to collect payments for your registration / ticket sales.  However an invoice will be issued as usual for all other types of payments.

Who pays the Eventzilla convenience fee?

Option A: You can make your event attendees pay the small convenience fee

Example: Your event registration price: $10 (With this option your attendees will pay $10+$1 fee when they register online. $10 will be sent to your PayPal account and $1 will be sent to Eventzilla’s PayPal account instantaneously)

Option B: You can choose to pay the small convenience fee yourself.

Example: Your event registration price: $10 (With this option your attendees will pay $10 when they register online. $9 will be sent to your PayPal account and $1 will be sent to Eventzilla’s PayPal account instantaneously)

Note: PayPal transaction fees are not included in the Eventzilla fee and these too will automatically deducted in real time during the transaction.  See PayPal website for further details. You can also use PayPal fee calculator to calculate applicable PayPal fees for your transactions.

If you have any queries about this latest enhancement or anything else, please feel free to contact us.

Best Regards

Eventzilla Team

Problem #1: Poor Planning

Everyone knows about this one. The program is thrown together haphazardly. Clients have little or no notice about the upcoming workshop or class. What’s worse is the event planner, due to lack of knowledge or inexperience, probably never considered hiring an event photographer, using event registration software or how they were going to promote the conference.

Solution: Using online event registration software like Eventzilla makes it possible for even the most inexperienced of planners to create conferences, workshops and other events that get results.

Problem #2: Failure To Promote

The company plans workshops, classes or product shows for six months into the future. Unfortunately, no one knows anything about their shows because they fail to promote the event. They never place advertisements or send out mailings. They just assume because they know about what they are planning, everyone else will get the message.

Solution: Marketing is the key. You wouldn’t try to sell a product without advertising. Why do this to your events? Sell tickets online, promote on Facebook Fan Page, send a tweet to your followers, create a hash tag for your event, send out messages to your mailing lists and use event registration software to log who is planning to attend.

Problem #3: Choosing The Wrong Conference Registration Software

Even though a program is designed to make the job of conference planning easier, if it is difficult to work with or doesn’t provide all the functionality needed, most people aren’t going to use it.

Solution: Pick a conference registration software program that has all of the functions you need without a long list of extra bells and whistles to confuse your planning and scheduling team. There are many pay per use event registration softwares available in the market.

Problem #4: Making It Difficult To Get Tickets

The consumers of the world are big fans of convenience. They want to do their shopping or find the information they are looking for in one place and anything that makes their lives easier becomes popular quickly. Unfortunately, many conference planners fail because they simply make things too difficult for prospective attendees.

Solution: Sell tickets online and offline. Make it easy for your clients to purchase tickets to your events as soon as they hear about them. Include the links to your online ticket purchasing outlet in your emails to your mailing lists so client can purchase tickets while the idea is still fresh in their minds. Last but not least – add a phone number to your event page to make it easy to reach you in case the attendee has a question before purchasing tickets for your event.

Problem #5: The Sins Of The Past

Was your last workshop a flop? While it is possible to recover from events that went bad in the past, it requires a lot more work to regain your reputation.

Solution: Prevent the problem before it starts by always using a top quality event registration software and follow through with your clients. Hire a professional event photographer to show prospective attendees just how much your even planning has improved. In short, show your clients that you learned the lesson and you are putting in the work to regain their respect.

Hosting a workshop or conference? Try Eventzilla to setup a custom registration form and accept payments to your PayPal account for Free!

Analyze the Event

This is the most important step once the event is done. We need to evaluate if the output from theevent was according to the expectations. If it wasn’t, where did we lack and even if it was, thereis always scope for improvement, isn’t there? Here are some suggestions that can help you measure the success of your event.

There may be many parameters to judge the success of an event.

1. Customer satisfaction
2. Budget for the event
3. Turnout for the event
4.Number of potential business leads

One of the important ones is the customer satisfaction. If your event attendees are satisfied – analyze the factors that will help fixing this problem in future. Make sure you follow-up with your event attendees with simple surveys to collect their feedback. You can also use online event registration tools like Eventzilla to send them discount codes for future events.
Budget: Add up the tangible as well as intangible benefits and outcomes from the event and compare that to the expenditure.While a profit or loss may not be your biggest concern, it is an imperative aspect for any event planner.

Turnout: Compare the turnout for the event to the number of people who had been invited. If there’s a shortfall, look back at the planning process and try to find out the weak areas.

Assess your marketing campaign and then analyze whether the turnout was as per the marketing done. There are new tools in the market to measure the social media marketing success and if the number of attendees were less, it’s time to re-design the marketing strategy.

Potential business leads: Analyze the number of leads for your business vs planned target number of leads expected out of this event.

Last but not least – create a lessons learned plan and share it with your event management team. Consider using online event registration software products like Eventzilla to setup and track event registrations for upcoming events.

VISA, Mastercard, AMEX and PayPal

For event organizers using Indian Rupees as the base currency – we support all major credit, debit cards issued in India and 35 major online bank accounts including ICICI, HDFC bank

2. Tell me how the money is transferred to my account?

Eventzilla directs the all the payment to your PayPal account directly.

Eventzilla will send you an invoice at the end of every month for the fees that your incurred from ticket sales and you can easily pay the fees online.

* For events using Indian Rupees as the bas e currency – we collect the payment on behalf of you and send a you check on a monthly basis.

3. Is Eventzilla secure?

At Eventzilla we know that our customers rely on us as an important part of their business processes and record keeping. We take our responsibilities to our customers seriously, and the security and reliability of the software, systems and data that make up the Eventzilla application are our top priority.

4.Can I pass on the Eventzilla service  fee to my attendees?

Yes. When you setup the event ticket / registration types you have an option to make your event attendees pay the small convenience fee. This means you pay absolutely nothing for using Eventzilla.

5. Can I collect cash payment for my events?
Yes – you can choose to collect cash payments and issue tickets onsite.

6. Can I accept donations for my event?
Yes  – you can only receive a fixed amount donation for your event at the moment.  We do have plans to add a open text field to accept any amount in future.

Hosting an event? Sign up for a free account at http://www.eventzilla.net to manage your online event registration easily.

- U.S. Dollars (USD)

- Canadian Dollars (CAD)

- Euros (EURO)

- British Pounds (GBP)

- Yen (YEN)

- Australian Dollars (AUD)

- Indian Rupees (INR)

- Singapore Dollars (SGD)

- New Zealand Dollars

- Swiss Francs

- Hong Kong Dollars (HKD)

- Swedish Kroner

- Danish Kroner

- Polish Zloty

- Norwegian Kroner

- Hungarian Forints

- Czech Koruny

- Israeli Shekels

- Mexican Pesos

- Brazilian Real

- Malaysian Ringgits

- Philippine Pesos

- Taiwan New Dollars

- Thai Baht

Online event registration allows event attendees to register online (RSVP) and make secure payments easily.  Event organizers can setup custom registration forms, deliver branded tickets on email, manage cancellations using an online event registration service like Eventzilla.net

2. What is Eventzilla.net?

Eventzilla is an inexpensive online event registration and ticketing website to list your event details, collect secure payments from attendees, promote your events using email marketing, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and manage cancellations in one place.

3. What types of events can I manage with Eventzilla?

Eventzilla can be used to manage registrations and payments for a variety of events ranging from business conferences, seminars, training events, fund raising events, cooking classes, language classes, fitness classes, computer  training classes,  tour packages, workshop registration, live concerts, comedy shows, expos, webinars, local meetups, marathon events and much more.

4. How much does it cost to use Eventzilla?

Free events = Free
Paid events = $1/attendee (You pay only when you make a sale)

Setup costs = None

Fees for ticket sales in Indian Rupees:  4.75%+Rs 5/attendee

Please check the pricing page for more international currencies support and fees.

5. Does Eventzilla support multiple currencies?

Yes – Eventzilla currently support 24 different world currencies including USD, CAD, GPD, EURO, AUD and Indian Rupees. Please check the pricing page for more details.

6. What do I need to get started?

A valid email address and a PayPal account. You can sign up for a free account at eventzilla to sell tickets/registrations online and we direct all the payments from your event sales directly to your PayPal account.

Eventzilla will send you an invoice at the end of every month for the fees that your incurred from ticket sales and you can easily pay the fees online.

For Indian Customers:
You just need a valid email address. We use CC Avenue/Citibank for securely processing payments for your events in Indian Rupees and we deliver the payments to your bank account every Month.

7. Can I create a repeating event with Eventzilla?

Yes – You can use our easy to use calendar widget to select recurring event dates up to 1 year.

8. How do I share the event details with my contacts?

Eventzilla allows you to create a unique subdomain like http://your-event-name.eventzilla.net – which can be shared with your potential target audience. In addition to this event web page – you can also easily embed the registration/ticket details in your website, blog, email marketing, Facebook, Twitter etc to promote your events in minutes.

9. Can I add different registration / ticket types for my event?

Yes. You can create early bird pricing with specific start date and end date, regular pricing and even onsite pricing as different options for registering to your event.

10. Can I send email invitations to my contacts?

Yes. You can import your existing contacts easily and send a professional looking email invitation announcing your event easily. (Daily limit for sending email invitations: 2000)

11.Can I pass on the Eventzilla service  fee to my attendees?

Yes. When you setup the event ticket / registration types you have an option to make your event attendees pay the small convenience fee. This means you pay absolutely nothing for using Eventzilla.

12. Can I create discount codes for my events?

Yes. You can add one or many special discount codes for your event which can be used by your attendees on checkout.