An elegant pay-as-you-like ticketing system for events

A few days ago one of our customers (event organizers) came to us with a simple brief:

We want to accept pay-as-you-like payments for events

Hmm, ok. I cannot even begin to describe the complexity hiding in this simple statement 😅

The larger requirement was as follows:

We want an option to accept payments (pay as you like for now, and may be fixed tickets later) along with registrations for the event.

So before we rolled up our sleeves and created a spiffy solution, we went on a journey to discover the current approaches and pain points.

Problem discovery

One big issue for them has been accepting payments. They had already tried various piecemeal approaches to enabling "pay-as-you-like", but nothing was really making the cut.

1. Two years ago, when they did paid offline events, they listed and used event sites like Eventbrite, Insider etc.
2. This year they had multiple conflicting approaches in mind - make it free? but we want tickets - but then we will end up forcing people to pay. wait! what we really want is pay-as-you-like! So in the end they decided on a simple 3rd party embedded registration form on their website. A user fills the form, and gets a UPI number (a mechanism for making payments in India), using which the user would then make a payment - if they felt like it 🤷🏻‍♀️
3. The event organizers would manually send a confirmation email when someone registered
4. A lot of people would claim on the form that they are paying INR 100, 200, 500, but 80% of those payments wouldn't actually come through
5. The event organizers followed up with the payees and realized that some people were waiting to receive a payment link, some were fake and so on

So not the best experience so far!

What's the desired system?

1. Community building at the core - use event registration as a way to get people to become members of the community, rather than engage only during an event
2. Of course, a pay-as-you-like mechanism
3. Do it on a single system - community x membership x #events x #payment x tracking
4. Consolidate all past registrations / database. Dashboards to know how many are attending and quantify sales / attendees.

So we crafted something rather elegant

Our motto is simple - we want to provide all the tools one needs to run modern Social+ businesses. Towards that end, we've been creating a really large set of tools and flows, superbly integrated and elegant. No, not the hacky method followed on DIY website builders like Wordpress or Wix etc. I've talked about this earlier.

We had the ability to create events using the Event Post type, which was quite comprehensive already.

On top of the existing Event flow, we needed all these new features:

1. Registration for a free event, ie an RSVP to inform the event creator of who's attending
2. Payment (and automatic registration) for a paid event
3. Grounds up payment gateway integration - for this we chose Razorpay in India
4. Turn on paid ticketing when creating the event
5. And finally the most difficult in terms of UX - pay-as-you-like

Read more in the help article.

See it in action

Here's a free event: https://live.maincross.org/topics/560/event/4044/bitsaa-jaipur-gala-dinner

And here's a pay-as-you-like event:

https://live.maincross.org/topics/504/event/1549/lets-have-some-fun-on-the-beach

What's next?

This is just the start. There's a lot more planned in terms of events and ticketing. The tools will undergo revisions and enhancements.

There will be more pricing mechanisms added (eg minimum ticket price), automated email on event registration, add to calendar options, view event registrations in member dashboard and dashboard for event creator.