Pedal Pusher: 1 week, 5 shows, 80 tickets to go
July 27th, 2009 by admin
Tickets selling fast
Pedal Pusher has received a phenominal response from audiences and critics alike. With only 80 tickets left, book online now to ensure your place at the action packed bioplay about the most explosive years of the Tour de France. Read more about Pedal Pusher More in our Blogs about Pedal Pusher Buy Tickets to Pedal Pusher securely online
Ticketing problems with Maestro Cards
July 27th, 2009 by admin
Google Checkout failed to inform us that they are no longer accepting Maestro payments from the 27th July.We only found out about this 2 days ago. We have been working hard with RapidTicketing to use PayPal instead of Google Checkout but this will not be ready for a couple of days yet.
As such, anyone unable to buy tickets to Pedal Pusher, due to only having a Maestro card, should use our contact form to request tickets (select the 'Tickets' type). Please do this before 3pm on the day of the show. We will then email you back to confirm you have tickets. If you do not receive an email by 4pm then you do not have a ticket.
We are very disappointed at Google to say the least and would like to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. You can of course still use Credit Cards, Switch and Visa Debit cards to buy tickets online and this is the best way to secure tickets.
Does theatre make money from Service Charges?
July 26th, 2009 by Paul Loy
One morning last week with toast in one hand, coffee in the other, BBC breakfast were interviewing a spokesperson for the airline industry. The said spokesperson was being asked to justify the service charges being levied on people buying airline tickets online. The presenters were asking why people were being charged so much when they had already bought a ticket for over £100. The spokesperson responded by saying that they are just passing the fees charged by the Banks onto the customer. The presenters then asked why the airline industry, and certain other industries like Theatre Tickets, used service charges when other industries do not. The spokesperson then came out with some drivel about transparent pricing...
So what about Theatre Tickets? Why do we charge a service charge?
As the Web Developer for theatredelicatessen, and the founder of RapidTicketing, I have quite an inside view into online sales and Bank charges. Our current checkout provider - Google Checkout - charge 3.4% of the transaction amount + 20p per transaction. For a £12 ticket (plus a 50p service charge) this amounts to a fee of 63p. If you then multiply this by an average years audience of around 1500 people, this 63p becomes £945.
This shows that it would cost theatredelicatessen nearly 100 tickets worth of money by offering tickets online if they did not add a service charge. They could, of course, just make all tickets £12.50 and then not charge a service charge. But then people buying tickets on the door would be paying for a service that they were not using.
Product based industries deal in fixed commodities. If you sell laptops, you know how much each of the components cost. You know how much it will cost to build the laptops and how much to ship them. You're dealing with a lot of knowns. Then when you come to sell the laptop, you have as long as you like to be able to sell it. You can reduce the price right down to the cost of the components and still break even.
In service industries, where tickets are sold for specific time slots, there are a lot of unknowns. How much, per ticket that you may sell, does each of the components cost? Without knowing how many tickets you will sell you cannot know this. When you price your ticket, there is a lot of guesswork. You want to make your ticket as cheap as possible in order to sell enough tickets as possible. By adding the service charge into the price of the tickets you may put people off and this will not help you reach your goal of breaking even, especially if people can still buy tickets at the door to avoid a service charge.
In short, the service charge levied on Theatre Tickets, by our service at least, is a transparent means of recovering the costs of providing an online ticketing system to the public, whilst making tickets available on the door at the lowest price possible. Others (sounds like "ticket vaster") may charge £2 per ticket and then £1.80 to collect the said ticket, but that would just be profiteering!
