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Passing the booking fee on to the buyer: what it costs you
Passing the booking fee on to your visitors looks free, but a surcharge on the last screen costs sales. Here is how to do the maths and how to sell without one.
· 5 min read
Your brass band is giving an autumn concert. The poster says 15 euros, and the ticketing platform suggests simply passing its per-ticket cost on to the buyer. That feels like a good deal: the band keeps the full 15 euros, and anyone who wants a ticket pays the little extra themselves.
But can you pass a ticket fee on without it costing you anything? This article does the maths, explains where it goes wrong and shows how to do it without a surcharge.
What "passing it on" means in practice
A platform that charges per ticket usually gives you two options. Either you absorb the cost yourself, and you receive a little less than your price for each ticket. Or you pass it on, and it is added to your price as a surcharge. That surcharge is then called a service charge, a booking fee or an admin fee, but it always comes down to the same thing: the buyer pays more than what is on your poster.
An example with a made-up platform that charges 1.50 euros per ticket:
| Absorb it yourself | Pass it on | |
|---|---|---|
| Price on the poster | 15 euros | 15 euros |
| What the buyer pays | 15 euros | 16.50 euros |
| What the band receives | 13.50 euros | 15 euros |
| Family with four tickets | 60 euros | 66 euros |
On paper, the right-hand column wins. In practice it depends on one question: do you still sell as many tickets with that surcharge?
Why a surcharge costs you sales
The surcharge appears at the worst possible moment. Your visitor has chosen their tickets, filled in their details and is about to pay. Then they see a different total than they expected. Anyone who hesitates at that point closes the window and thinks "I'll buy at the door". Some of them never come.
It feels like a trick, even though it isn't one. A family expecting to pay 60 euros and seeing 66 euros does not remember that the band earns nothing from it. They remember that the price was wrong. For a club that relies on its loyal audience, that is an expensive impression to leave.
It makes your price harder to compare. Your concert sits alongside other options for a night out. Anyone who sees 15 euros and pays 16.50 compares it afterwards with the higher amount.
It puts a question to your committee that does not need to be asked. If you pass the cost on, you have to explain why a 15-euro ticket costs 16.50 euros. If you show one price, there is nothing to explain.
Do the maths for your own event
Say your concert sells 250 tickets. With a surcharge of 1.50 euros per ticket, your visitors pay 375 euros extra between them. If you sell 25 fewer tickets because people drop out at checkout, you miss 375 euros in ticket revenue, and those people do not buy anything at your bar either.
So put three numbers side by side:
- what the surcharge costs your visitors over a season;
- how many fewer tickets you need to sell before that amount is gone;
- what a platform without a per-ticket fee costs you over a year.
How to work out that last one is covered in the article on an alternative to platforms with per-ticket fees and under per-ticket costs.
Build the cost into your price instead of adding it on top
There is one cost you have with every platform and in every web shop: that of your payment provider, an amount per payment. If you want to cover it, build it into your ticket price rather than adding it on top. Say your provider charges 30 cents per payment, an example amount rather than the rate of any particular provider. Then you ask, for example, 16 euros instead of 15 euros, and after your provider's cost you keep more than the 15 euros on the poster. The buyer sees that amount from the very first screen, and the total no longer changes along the way.
How your payment provider's cost works and how to record it is explained in Payouts and costs.
How it works with Passavo
With Passavo there is no ticket fee to pass on. You pay the fixed amount of your plan, or nothing on the Free plan: up to 100 paid tickets per event, with no amount per ticket.
- The price you enter is the price the buyer pays. It includes VAT, and nothing is added to it in your ticket shop. How to set a price is explained in Products and prices.
- A separate price per channel. The same ticket can cost 15 euros online and 17 euros at the door, using the Prices block with the channel Online or Desk. People who buy in advance pay less, and you know beforehand how many people are coming. The desk till is included from the Start plan.
- Early-bird discount without surcharges. Give an online price an end date with Valid up to and including, and add a second price that applies after that.
- The money goes straight to your own account, through your own Mollie or Stripe account. We keep nothing of it.
In short
Passing a ticket fee on to the buyer shifts the cost to your visitors, but not away from your club: you pay it in tickets that go unsold. Show one price that holds, from the poster to the last screen. Which plan fits is shown on the pricing page.
