Hi Julie,
Thanks for reaching out to us, and for your interest in our plugins 🙂
You don’t need The Events Calendar to sell tickets! You’ll need to install Event Tickets + Event Tickets Plus + an e-commerce plugin (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, WP-Ecommerce or Shopp). Once the plugins are installed you’ll need to set the post-types (posts, pages, etc) in which the tickets functionality will be available (WP-Admin > Events > Settings > Tickets) and that’s it!
Please let me know if you have any other questions I can help you with,
Best,
Nico