TicketSignup has simple, low pricing – $1 per transaction + 6% of the total (we do a per transaction to encourage families and friends to signup together so our customers sell more tickets). For event organizations that sell over 5,000 tickets or $200,000 of transaction volume, we share 20% of that processing fee back via our Partner Program – that means the event organizer gets paid 20 cents per transaction + 1.2% of the transaction total. For the above example of 5,000 tickets and $200,000, that is about $3,000 (assuming each transactions ells an average of 2 tickets) of additional revenue.
BUT – You Can Make More by Setting Higher Processing Fees!
We allow our larger customers in the Partner Program to easily set their own fees and keep the difference.
For example, set the fee at $2 per transaction and 8% and that is an extra $6,500 of revenue in the above example.
Many of our largest customers do this. One sets a flat 10% fee on their $85 tickets. That clears them an additional $3.62 on each ticket for their 6,000 ticket event – over $20,000 of incremental revenue.
Ticketmaster’s Pricing Umbrella
One of the reasons that most customers will not object at all to a slightly higher processing fee is that high pricing expectations that have been set by Ticketmaster for their events.
John Oliver does a funny skit on this:
For a deeper analysis, the Freakonomics Podcast did a deep dive into processing fees and how Ticketmaster and their customers price processing fees.
And then there are those much-unloved “service fees” that vendors like Ticketmaster add. In New York, they average 21 percent of the ticket price but, as we heard earlier, they can reach 100 percent of face value. Something that’s not widely understood is that these service fees often — part of them goes back to the venue. So Ticketmaster takes all the P.R. hit for these egregious service fees. But actually a lot of that money spreads its way around the rest of the food chain.
Freakonomics Podcast
Summary
If you are a larger event organizer, talk with us about how you can add revenue with setting custom processing fees.