@funvill’s suggestion reminded me I’ve been meaning to do a brief commentary on payment collection options, and my (biased) opinions of them. I was hoping to gather others opinions and suggestions, to hopefully provide guidance for people looking to host events or run group buys.
Fees and convenience can vary significantly! There’s no single best answer. Here’s several options, and what they charge for up to several hundred dollars.
Cash/Cheque - No fee.
Downside - more difficult to track, requires meeting up in person, which can cause logistical issues. It’s polite to accept it as a fallback.
Eventbrite (credit card) - 6% + 1$
Extremely convenient, but expensive as workshop cost goes up. Has a nice feature in allowing you to limit number of attendees. Collects information, manages refunds.
Paypal transfer (credit card) - 2.9% plus $0.30
Simple for one off transfers and group buys. Advantage over interac is the ability to push requests for money to participants. Moving the money out can be a bit of a pain.
Interac Etransfer - ~$1 and $1.50, depending on bank
Flat fee, which is attractive, and becomes more so the more expensive the workshop. No request mechanism, limited data collection and clicking through to claim from all participants can be tedious. Relatively uncommon, so can create confusion.
One additional note, is that you can mix eventbrites free option to control attendance and collect information, and use another method to collect payment.
Personally, I dislike proportional fees when I’m runnign an event, as I don’t think that Eventbrite does more for me when I’m hosting a $300 workshop than a $10 one, so I like using Interac E-transfer.
I’ve used eventbrite free + cash at the door for a tournament, where we didn’t need to c
cover costs beforehand, and it also went quite smoothly.
Anyone else have comments on the above methods? others? your own preferences?
My preference is Eventbrite as it is quite simple for all involved and provides a lot of tools for the event organizer. I particularly like to mass email features and the ability to collect registration fees for events that have multiple dates & times.
Whatever collection option is used, I prefer a prepayment method which addresses the annoying situation of people signing up for a workshop that has limited attendance capacity and then not showing up or cancelling at the last minute.
In addition to the $1 Interac transfer, Tangerine (ex-ING) has a “Free Tangerine Email Money Transfer (2-3 business business days)”. I’ve used it a few times, and from my experience it is as fast as Interac.
Consider using Picatic.com, we are a local tech startup here in Vancouver. We work on a fair pay system for our fees. Pay what you can afford, as low as 0%. We have an inhouse payment processor that we currently charge a flat 2.9% for; or, setup a Stripe account and get your funds directly.
We are releasing an API early 2015 that could also allow some really flexible uses of our platform.
I’m available to help setup and manage any event on Picatic for VHS workshops or events.
You can also manually “sell” cash/cheque tickets with no fees charged from a pool of tickets. This helps keep attendance in the one place.
I really dislike Evenbrite’s support for multi-week events and the limited ticketing options. As far as I can tell you can’t create a pool of tickets and sell at difference prices from the same pool (eg. I have a build night limited to 20 people but those 20 people can choose one of a group of kits with different prices).
Agreed, it sucks.
This sounds cool, @interlock perhaps we can get you to come by for an informal overview once we’ve moved in? I’m looking for stuff like multi-week event support and lots of pricing options within an event (eg. sign up for workshop and then choose the kit you want to build from a range). It would also be cool if you could support splitting payments into multiple accounts (stripe would be fine) so we can send some of the money to vhs and take the rest ourselves to cover costs, buy materials etc.
Went and created a test event - first impression’s pretty favorable for picatic (vs eventbrite - I still don’t love credit card based options for more expensive workshops, but I realize this isn’t something really within their control).
You do seem to be able to set a total cap on attendance, which cuts off all tickets at that point. Adding an externally sold ticket doesn’t seem complex.
doesn’t seem quite as skin-able as eventbrite, but I don’t bother with that for VHS stuff.
Multi- week event support seems a bit minimal - different ticket types could do the job, but the “date and time” of an event seems to be singular.
I don’t see anything for “you have 10 minutes to check out, then ticket goes back in the pool” style? It works well for large and over subscribed events, although probably overkill for most things at VHS.
Thanks for checking us out Jon. We appreciate the feedback.
Like most startups, we are constantly iterating and working to add the valuable features that our users need.
We intend to add multi-day event support in the future, it has been on our roadmap for sometime. Talking to a lot of promoters with multi-day events has shown us that it is difficult to create a solution that works for everyone.
We do offer a white label solution, where you can skin the header, footer and emails. It unfortunately does come with a base cost per ticket.
We haven’t had the need to show a timer for tickets, as general assembly style events are first come, first serve generally. That said, we have a new checkout system planned that will support reserving a ticket during checkout
We are also on the verge of releasing an API that could be used customize nearly every aspect of the ticket purchasing experience. Stay tuned.
Let me know if there are any question at all or if you hit any road blocks/issues. → james@picatic.com
@interlock I am using picatic to organize the upcoming Papercraft workshop and love the process. One thing I think would be great would be the option to pay it forward and allow tickets to be FairPay as well.
Thanks for the feedback @miststlkr! That is an interesting idea. Our future plans for a more flexible API would allow tickets that have a “donation” ticket price for example. I’ll mark it down as a possible use case for that feature
In fact, if you are going to implement that, a “minimum donation” would likely be the best approach. Let the organizer set a minimum price and allow the buyer to pick anything over that set price. For example, “I’m running a workshop on how to assemble Spacely Sprocket Kit 555 and materials cost $30, anything more than that will go towards buying extra kits to be donated to the VHS at large.” I don’t know how much use that would get in the outside world, but I can think of a few usecases. I went to a Paint Nite recently. Tickets are a fixed price which goes to the company and the venue and whatever contract rate the instructor makes, then they ask for a donation directly to the artist instructor and the assistant instructor at the event and we didn’t have cash on us so we felt kinda lame.
There is a “donation” field too, which functionally, wouldn’t be any different than what you’re describing. Pre-populating the field might be a good idea.
Along those same lines, using “herd mentality” to your advantage, it would be really great to be able to display “average price paid” a la https://www.humblebundle.com/
(See the green text where it says “Pay more than the average of $11.53 to unlock!”)
This is insanely smart. The more people who pay that little bit more to get above the average, the higher the average tends (unending) - meaning people are incentivized to get in early and get the ball rolling, while later adopters still feel like they’re getting a deal.
The good: It was very easy to set up, the interface for buying tickets is intuitive [especially to anyone who has used Kickstarter], it is nice and clean visually and the option to have multiple ticket rates is great, for example, for a workshop where you can pick “I’ll bring my own hardware” vs “I’ll buy your kit on the night”.
The Bad: I may be entirely mistaken, it is entirely possible this was a failure on my part, but I’ll have to look into the settings again I didn’t set a cutoff time to buy tickets but I don’t remember seeing that option. This would be handy for workshops requiring ordering parts, etc. I didn’t have a need for it so I may have overlooked it or simply forgotten. I would love a pay-what-you-want option for the price, but that’s neither here nor there and has been passed on to the devs. That’s really is… one suggested feature and one possible oversight on my part.
Overall: I recommend you give it a shot. I made a couple of small suggestions tot he devs and they were very receptive, assured me that there was still active development and suggestions would be considered… which is really, in my opinion, a best-case result. I found it entirely usable and suited my needs nicely. Plus, you can’t beat the free-as-in-beer pricetag. Next workshop I’ll use it again, charge a nominal fee, and donate a chunk of the proceeds to the devs.
Thanks again for the feedback and review. There is a way to cut off ticket sales on the tickets themselves for next time.
We are actively working a lot of improvements and hope to work with VHS to make some slick workshop management flows with our soon to be new version 2 API. Which I believe we can abuse to do the humble bundle style pricing!
My workshop didn’t require parts to be ordered and the worst case was a few extra minutes printing another kit so I didn’t set a cutoff. I just couldn’t remember if I didn’t set it or if it wasn’t there. Good to know it was there, it’s a handy feature.
