Payment processing for online ticketing is very similar to what happens in a traditional online shopping cart. Your customers make a purchase, then enter their credit card details or alternatively, PayPal may be used as the payment processor. In the former case, the interface between the ticketing website and your bank's merchant account is handled by a payment gateway.

There are many payment gateway services available, and most of the better quality ticketing programs will allow you to integrate with most of these. If you wish, you can avoid setting up separate accounts with both a payment gateway provider and a merchant account via with certain organizations. In fact major banks generally offer this service.

For small organizations., PayPal might be a better option, at least in the short term, as it is much easier to set up. The disadvantage is that if you are choosing the standard PayPal setup, then a customer is transferred from the ticketing website to PayPal for the payment process, and then back again to the website after of the payment has been complete. The more advanced PayPal option, Web Payments Pro, is rather more superior in this respect as it effectively processes credit card payments in the same way as other payment gateways without transferring you to the PayPal site for payment processing.

But the biggest disadvantage of using organizations. such as PayPal rather than a payment gateway is that if you wish to enter credit card details within the ticketing program, for phone bookings, mail order bookings etc, then it is not possible to do this with PayPal as these details need to be entered directly through the PayPal website itself via Virtual terminal.

Some ticketing companies offer the option of handling all the payments side... in this case the ticketing company receives all the ticket revenue directly, and only passes this revenue to you at a specified time period, normally after the event has been held. Naturally if they are offering this service, then there would be an extra charge for the payment processing. This type of service can of course be a big negative if you have a tight cash flow, and of course you also need some assurance that the ticketing company is operating profitably and is not likely to shut down without notice.

in most cases, shopping around for a good deal with a payment processor and merchant account is generally the best option, since not only can you reduce your costs to as low as possible, but you will also receive all your the ticket income the minute a ticket is sold.