Since its inception in 2011, Quicket has tried to provide the lowest cost pricing to event organisers. One of the ways in which we've done so has been to split the ticketing costs between the organiser and the ticket buyer. As a result, this has allowed us to charge what we refer to as our commission and the service fee.

The commission is charged to organisers and covers the percentage linked costs that go into processing payments. The service fee is typically charged to ticket buyers as a way of covering the fixed fee costs that go into completing a ticket sale. In South Africa, our service fee has been R5 per ticket, with a cap of R10 per transaction since 2013.

As inflation has reduced the buying power of that service fee, we've been reluctant to increase it. For this reason, we're now forced to consider how to keep it fair while still being able to provide the same world class service for which we're now globally recognised to our event organisers and ticket buyers.

One option would have been to simply increase the service fee yearly as the fixed costs increase. This would result in ticket buyers paying an ever-increasing service fee each year that they return to their favourite events.

We know that:

• Close on 80% of ticket buyers are only buying one or two tickets in a single transaction
• Less than 10% buy three tickets in a single transaction
• The last few percent make up bulkier orders

With this in mind, we then realised that if we remove the service fee transaction cap, this would mean we could make up the shortfall of the weakened fixed fee without having to increase the fee.

So what does this mean?

While it means a small group of ticket buyers will need to pay an extra R5 when buying their tickets, and a very small percentage may pay more, we felt this is fair considering the additional administration costs that go into supporting transactions of bulk orders.

The upside is that this pricing change would not affect the vast majority of ticket buyers. Above all, it allows us to keep offering the same rates to organisers.

And there's good news for ticket buyers and organisers who absorb service fees as well. Although the majority are not paying anything additional, we've also entirely removed the service fee for tickets sold at a face value of R100 or less. In other words, this will allow events with low ticket prices to now offer those tickets online without worrying that the marginal cost is too high for ticket buyers. If you'd like to make use of this, please chat to our Organiser Success team on [email protected] or 021 424 9308.

Certain organisers elect to absorb the service fee as a cost to themselves. This is a way of lightening the payment burden on ticket buyers, especially where they have low price tickets. The service fee removal for low cost tickets applies to these organisers as well.

Lastly, we have renamed our service fee to a booking fee to be more in line with modern terminology and clearer to everyone that this is a fee paid for the fixed costs and administration that go into facilitating an online sale and post-sale processing and support.

These changes will only take effect on all new events created after 1pm on Wednesday, 6 March 2019.

Anyone weighing up their options when it comes to ticketing will be eager to figure out what their bottom line will be. Since our first event ticketed in 2011, we've always charged a 4.9% commission deducted from your final payout.

This commission covers the significant processing costs of the banking layer of online commerce. It's also how we're able to provide support for ticket buyers and continue building the platform.

Some recent changes in the market have seen ticketing platforms use clever wording to appear cheaper by marketing the commission as a split fee of two components: the payment processing fee and the ticketing fee. For Quicket, this means that we in effect offer our ticketing platform at 2.4% ex VAT with a payment processing fee of 2.5% ex VAT.

If you have your own payment gateway (such as a PayU, PayFast or Stripe account) you can use that for the payment processing and just pay a 2.4% ticketing fee ex VAT to Quicket. If you use Quicket's payment processing facilities, there's no effective change to the 4.9% ex VAT since you're paying for both components.

We're introducing this pricing split and now advertising Quicket as a ticketing platform that charges 2.4% ex VAT for ticketing. This is the only way to compare our pricing effectively with other ticketing platforms.

If you're a high volume event with sales over R250k, please contact us for volume-based discounts.

The bottom line? Quicket is still the most cost-effective way to ticket an event in Africa and provides:

• fast and free support for you and your ticket buyers;
• arguably the most advanced ticketing platform in Africa;
• field services;
• your own database and reporting;
• and much more for 2.4% ex VAT...
• Free events? Free.

If you have questions, we're happy to chat and figure out what's best for you and your events.

These are all the pricing updates for now. We've worked hard to ensure that we can deliver the best ticketing platform and support in Africa while keeping admin and costs at a minimum for event organisers.