Busting the "Free Ticket Selling" Myth
Free ticket selling is an expensive illusion based more on clever marketing than reality. What some companies offer as a free ticketing solution by passing the fees onto your customers, is actually a clever ploy to charge higher booking fees on tickets, and withhold more revenue from you, the promoter.
If you plan events, and are considering selling tickets online, here’s what you need to know.
Nothing is free
What could be better? Sell your tickets online, completely free, and pass any ticket fees onto your customers. “Free ticket selling” is an increasingly popular sales pitch by companies such as Eventbrite, Skiddle, WeGotTickets etc. to hide the fact that the fees being charged to your customers are overpriced – and that cheaper options are available.
Lets look at a real world example…..
Skiddle
Skiddle’s main heading when you land on their pricing page is…
“Pay no fees to use Skiddle - Yes! It's completely FREE.”
They then proceed to state that…
“Listings events is free, whether you have one or a thousand, there's no charge. If you sell tickets through Skiddle, you don't pay a penny either, you receive 100% of the ticket face value. All our costs are covered by a booking fee (typically around 10% but lower for higher priced tickets) which is paid by the customer. “
When you sign up and actually start to sell your event, you realise that the cost to your customers is a whopping 10% + 25p, which you then need to cover inside a booking fee. That means that on a £20 ticket, the booking fee your customer must pay is £2.25.
Payment processors such as Stripe charge 1.4% + 20p for European cards, and you can bet that Skiddle have a deal with a card processor of their own that means they pay a lot less than that.
So let’s run the figures…..
- Say you are selling 200 tickets at £20 a ticket.
- Skiddle charge your customers 10% + 25p per ticket (£2.25).
- Now lets minus the 1.4% + 20p that a card processor might charge.
- That’s 8.6% +5p that Skiddle are making from your customers.
- Over 200 tickets, Skiddle just earnt themselves £354.
Running the same scenario with EventBrite’s middle package (6.5% + 49p), they would make £274.
Its not exactly free is it?
So what if you could keep that money for yourself?
TicketEase
This is where we come in. TicketEase charges 36p FLAT. Seriously.
When you sell tickets with TicketEase, you set and keep the remaining booking fee.
So let’s run the example above through TicketEase.
- Once again, you are selling 200 tickets at £20 a ticket.
- You set a booking fee on your ticket of £2.25 (to match Skiddle)
- Out of that booking fee, you pay Stripe their 1.4% + 20p (48p).
- You pay TicketEase their 36p.
- This leaves you with £1.41, which means that after 200 tickets, you have actually MADE an extra £282 on your event!
So those examples again in comparison with other major ticket retailers....
- Skiddle (10% + 25p) | £2.25 booking fee
- BEFORE: Your customers would have paid them £450
- WITH TICKETEASE: You made an extra £322…. That’s a £772 profit gain!!
- Eventbrite Essentials (4% + 49p) | £1.29 booking fee
- BEFORE: Your customers would have paid them £258
- WITH TICKETEASE: You made an extra £130…. That’s a £388 profit gain!!
- Eventbrite Professional (6.5% + 49p) | £1.79 booking fee
- BEFORE: Your customers would have paid them £358
- WITH TICKETEASE: You made an extra £230…. That’s a £588 profit gain!!
- WeGotTickets (10%) | £2.00 booking fee
- BEFORE: Your customers would have paid them £400
- WITH TICKETEASE: You made an extra £272…. That’s a £672 profit gain!!
The Money should be in your pocket, not theirs
But TicketEase is an online ticket retailer too! Why are you doing it so cheap?
We were promoters first - and we put on loads of events, with tens of thousands of tickets sold, and eye watering amounts of booking fees going to Eventbrite, Fatsoma or WeGotTickets - we were sick of it. So we built our own.
Join us now, and save literally hundreds of pounds with your next event.