RALEIGH — Ordering tickets to an event online can be a hassle. A Raleigh company has come up with a way to order electronic tickets and print them at your home or office.

Raleigh'sEtix.comis making online ticket buying easier. Instead of waiting for your tickets to be mailed, you print them yourself.

"You have to enter your e-mail address so that if your printer jams or anything like that, you can come back and reprint your ticket," says Travis Janovich, CEO of Etix.com.

Once the ticket is billed to the browser, the user prints the ticket. The important part is the two-dimensional bar code. The ticketholder takes the whole piece of paper to the event.

Ticket takers at the event use a special scanner that is built into a PDA (personal digital assistant) and scans the ticket. Confirmation goes over a wireless network to the ticketing database.

"They just push a button, they scan it," Janovich says. "It makes a noise when it decodes. It's very, very simple."

Etix.com has hooked up with several event venues in South Carolina. The company has plans for a quick expansion.

"We're doing gift certificates and doing ticketing," Janovich says. "We're finalists for a movie deal to sell 600 million tickets a year online."

The bar code information is strongly encrypted to ensure security of personal information. E-tix plans to license its counterfeit-proof system to venues around the country. The company makes money through licensing and transaction fees.