How to create a Zoom link automatically for every ticketed event

The short answer

Copying a Zoom link into a ticketing page by hand works, until you run the same session every week, change a date, or paste last month’s link by mistake. Connecting Zoom takes the copying away: you connect your own Zoom account once, and One Ticket creates the Zoom meeting (or webinar) for each online event, with a link of its own, and puts it on every ticket.

Creating Zoom meetings for you is on the Pro and Team plans. Pro and Team are open now: upgrade any time in Settings › Plan. Limited-time offer: A$1 for your first year (first 100 organisers), then A$29/month for Pro or A$79/month for Team. Cancel anytime. On Free you paste your own Zoom, Google Meet or Teams link, which works just as well for an occasional event.

This post covers the one-off set-up, what happens when you save an event, repeating sessions, and what to know about changing or deleting events. For the bigger picture, start with how to sell tickets to a Zoom event.

How the connection works

Zoom only lets an outside service create meetings through an app. On One Ticket, each person connects through a Zoom app on their own Zoom account: a small private app that only you use, with nothing to publish or have reviewed by Zoom. You make it once, in about five minutes, and Settings › Zoom walks you through it.

The connection asks Zoom for your name and email address, and permission to make, read and delete meetings and webinars. One Ticket never sees your Zoom password. Your app’s secret and the keys Zoom hands back are stored encrypted, and are never shown on a page or sent anywhere.

Step 1: Make your Zoom app

1. Sign in to Zoom’s App Marketplace with the Zoom account you host from.
2. Choose Develop, Build App, then General App, then User-managed.
3. Under OAuth Information, paste the redirect address that Settings › Zoom shows you (there’s a Copy button), and add the same address to the OAuth Allow List.
4. Under Scopes, add each scope that Settings lists.
5. Under App Credentials, copy the Client ID and Client Secret. The Development pair is enough, because it lets in your own Zoom account.

Zoom’s screens change from time to time, so if a menu looks different, check Zoom’s own help as you go.

Step 2: Connect Zoom

1. Back in Settings › Zoom, paste the Client ID and Client Secret and choose Save app. One Ticket checks them with Zoom before keeping them.
2. Choose Connect Zoom, then Allow on Zoom’s screen.
3. Settings shows the Zoom address you connected as.

If you left out the webinar scopes, Settings says webinars can’t be made yet. Add them to your app and connect again.

Step 3: Save an online event with Generate with Zoom

1. Create an event with a title, a date, and start and end times.
2. Open Add a place and choose Online.
3. Under Generate with Zoom, choose the Zoom type: Meeting or Webinar.
4. Save the event. One Ticket creates the Zoom meeting for you when you save the event, and the join link appears in the meeting link field.

The meeting is made on your Zoom account for the event’s next date, in the event’s own time zone, with the event’s title as its topic. Its length comes from the start and end times. A meeting has the waiting room on, mutes people as they arrive and lets them in before the host. There’s no Zoom registration form: the tickets are the registration.

From there the link travels like a pasted one: the ticket page, the ticket email, the calendar entry, the reminders and the “Starting in 15 minutes” email, from the time you choose under Ticket holders see the link.

Repeating sessions: one link each

For a weekly class or a monthly meetup, each session is an event of its own, and each should have its own Zoom meeting. That way a link forwarded for one week doesn’t open the next.

Open a session’s place and choose Create a unique Zoom link for each session. Every upcoming session of the series that has no link, or shares its link with another session, gets its own meeting, soonest first, 26 at a time. If more are left, it tells you, and you press it again.

New sessions added later as the weeks pass start with the link of the session before them, so press the button again from time to time to give them their own. The post on weekly online classes on Zoom covers series in detail.

Whose Zoom hosts it

In a series with more than one person on your account who could host, Meetings run on chooses whose Zoom makes its meetings. Anyone can take it on or hand it back; owners and admins can choose someone else, once that person has connected their own Zoom. With nobody named, each meeting is made on the Zoom of whoever creates it.

Changing, regenerating and deleting

• Make it again. Choosing Generate again makes a new meeting and removes the old one that One Ticket made. Links to the old one in emails already sent stop working, but ticket pages and reminders still to come give the new one.
• Moving the date. If you move an event to a new date or time, check the Zoom meeting matches, and make it again if it doesn’t.
• Deleting an event removes the meeting One Ticket made for it, unless another event still uses it.
• Tidy up Zoom in Settings finds meetings One Ticket made that no event uses any more, and removes them. It never touches meetings you made yourself, or ones an event still uses.
• Disconnect stops new meetings being made. Meetings already made, and their links on tickets, keep working.

When to paste instead

Generating isn’t always the right answer. Paste your own link when you use a meeting you’ve already set up with special settings, when a co-host from another organisation is hosting, or when you’re running the event on Google Meet or Teams. A pasted link and a generated one look the same to your ticket holders. See Zoom, Google Meet or Teams for a ticketed webinar.

Every button is in the help guide on online events, and the webinars page shows how online tickets look. Plan prices are on the pricing page.