You Get What You Pay For

When I began writing for Ticketbud a little less than a year ago (my my, time flies!), we had recently transitioned our pricing model from a fixed fee per event to a per-ticket “service fee”..  It was admittedly not the smoothest transition. Whenever you radically change a pricing model, you’ll always be on the receiving end of some negative feedback. We expected this and took the proactive route in educating our customers why we were making the change. Many understood and continue to get immense value out of our platform. Others used us because of our old pricing model and moved to a solution that fit their needs. Ultimately, we’ve now served more customers than ever before and you want to know the best part? Everyone has been able to get exactly what they wanted out of the platform. I’m going to open up a bit here with what I’ve learned over the past year. I will be as transparent as possible and while there may be some things that aren’t so great, there’s a lot of great things here too. You’ll see a lot of ticketing companies out there claim that fees are absolutely horrible and why? Well, the problem all stems from a particular ticket “master” in the ticketing industry which charged huge, completely unexplained fees and had the gall to make you pay a fee to print your tickets. Naturally, that rubbed everyone the wrong way and as a result, companies that collect revenue via ticket fees are unfairly compared with highway robbers. Here’s the great thing about per-ticket fees:  Event organizers can use the platform for free if they choose to pass on the small per-ticket fee to their attendees. This makes online ticketing MORE cost-effective than before, since now you’re not paying a fixed fee per event. In fact, you’re not being charged anything. Our opinion is that if you’ve done the legwork to produce an exciting event, a small service fee won’t deter attendees from purchasing. So what about companies that brag about having no ticket fees? Well they have to make their money somehow, and they do that through charging you some sort of subscription or fixed price per event. That’s great, but they either end up being too expensive to use (what if your tickets are $5 and you’re expecting 20 people?) or the functionality that they provide at the price is too low for a larger scale event.. Try running a 1000 person Comic Con off of a $25 per event site and you’re bound to run into some issues.  Meanwhile, companies that utilize service charges can scale much more efficiently and more adequately fulfill your needs. As an anecdote, back when Ticketbud  had a fixed price model, we  didn’t offer a customer support line you could call. It just wasn’t cost effective! So yeah, we were cheap – in more ways than one. And it just wasn’t very sustainable either, which is why  we made the transition in the first place. So, long story short, service charges have been unfairly maligned in the ticketing industry. Too often, people focus on the service charges and forget that with them, they can use platforms for free. And if they do choose to accept the service charge, then they’re only charged based off how successful they were. Ultimately it encourages companies such as ours to make YOU, the event organizer, as successful as possible.]]]]> ]]>