What could Scandit do for Amiando?

Organizing, marketing and selling an event are no easy tasks at all. Luckily there are platforms like Amiando or Eventbrite, which take care of those tasks at low prices.

If you sell event tickets using an online event management service like Amiando, your participants simply print their tickets at home and bring them to the event. Gone are the times where you would wait in line at the ticket counter (only to learn that the show is sold out by the time you get there…). But by letting your customers print their tickets themselves, of course, you have not solved all problems in event management. A bunch of problems remain:

• A physical ticket can always be printed twice or more. How do you prevent that?
• If someone wants a refund, how do you make sure she does not attend anyway?
• How do you know how many people attended and how many did not turn up? If you’ve got an event with ten participants, that’s not going to be an issue. But if you’re organizing a concert with hundreds of listeners, good luck.

To address these issues you obviously need to check the physical tickets against the sales data stored at Amiando. Here are some options how to do this:

1. A simple option would be to keep a list of all ticket numbers and cross out all those that came by the entrance. While this would be a no-brainer for small events, it would quite certainly end up in a logistical disaster for bigger ones. The approach is slow, labor intensive and thus expensive.
2. There’s a better way to link the physical with the virtual world – and Amiando has already implemented it: by including a 1-dimensional Interleaved 2 of 5 (ITF) barcode and a 2-dimensional Datamatrix code on all printed tickets and reading them with barcode scanners at the entrance, the above issues can be addressed rather conviently.

To date, however, event organizers typically use special-purpose devices to scan barcodes, which are complex, clunky and costly to distribute to each event. A faster, more convenient, more affordable way would be to offer event organizers a smartphone app with Scandit’s leading-edge barcode scanning technology. With Scandit event organizers could easily, reliably and cost-effectively validate each event ticket at the entrances. The advantages are obvious: No need to buy, rent and handle clunky barcode scanner hardware, less organizational overhead or training sessions and lower total costs.

With Scandit’s unique capability to scan both ITF and Datamatrix (amongst many other) barcodes fast and reliably, even management services like Amiando can now leverage existing smartphones as scanning devices. And since the Scandit technology is fast, reliable and also works in the presence of low light, shadow or glare, event organizers would have an easy-to-use and affordable tool to validate tickets and keep track of which participants finally showed up – or didn’t.

Of course, the above use case analogously applies to similar ticketing solutions, too.