How to Set Up Early Bird Ticket Pricing on WordPress

Early bird pricing is a discount with a deadline. Before the deadline buyers pay less, after it they pay the normal price, and the only thing you have to decide is how much less and until when.

In Eventonomy that is two fields on a paid ticket. This post covers where they are, what checkout does with them, and the places where the feature stops, so you can plan around the limits instead of finding them after you announce the sale.

One thing up front: early bird pricing is part of Eventonomy Pro. Selling paid tickets online needs a payment gateway, and the gateways come with Pro too, so a Free-only site has no online paid checkout to apply a discount to.

What the feature does, and the rules it follows

You give a paid ticket a lower price and an end date and time. While that window is open, buyers are charged the early bird price. Once it passes, the ticket goes back to its normal price. Nobody has to edit the event at the deadline, because the price follows the clock.

Three rules always hold:

• Paid tickets only. Free tickets and donation tickets ignore the early bird fields and use their normal price.
• A discount, never a surcharge. Checkout charges whichever is lower, the early bird price or the normal price. If you accidentally type an early bird price above the normal one, the normal price is used.
• Blank means off. A ticket with no early bird fields filled in always charges its normal price.

Setting it up

Open the event in the event editor and find the ticket rows. On a paid ticket you will see two extra fields from Pro:

Field	What it does
Early-bird price	The discounted price while the window is open
Early-bird ends	The date and time the window closes

Enter the deadline in your site’s own timezone, the one set under Settings, General. Eventonomy interprets it in that timezone and stores it in UTC, so you do not need to convert anything yourself. Save the event and you are done.

The fields appear on every ticket row, but they only take effect on paid tickets.

What the buyer is charged

When someone checks out, the price is worked out on the server from the ticket record, not taken from whatever the page sent. That matters for two reasons. A buyer cannot lower the amount by editing the request, and the deadline is checked against the clock at the moment they pay, not when they opened the page.

Early bird pricing runs first. The discounted subtotal is then the base that everything else works from: a coupon comes next, then fees and tax.

Here is the arithmetic with made-up numbers. A ticket normally costs 100 and has an early bird price of 80. A buyer uses a 10 percent coupon during the window. The coupon applies to 80, not 100, so it takes off 8 and the subtotal is 72, before any fees or tax. Coupons can also be a fixed amount, and either kind is applied to the early bird subtotal.

The order also stores a record of what happened: for each line where an early bird price applied, the normal price, the price charged and the tier label. The discount is written down on the order instead of being lost in the total.

More than one price step

The event editor gives each ticket one early bird window. The pricing engine itself supports a ladder of steps, each with its own price and end time, and at checkout the first step whose window is still open wins, in the order you declared them.

Those ladders are set through the REST API by sending a list of price-and-end-time steps with the ticket, so they suit a developer or an import script rather than a site owner clicking in the editor. Each step can carry its own label. If you leave it blank, the label is “Early bird”.

Ticket responses from the API also include an effective_price field, which is the price a buyer would be charged right now. A mobile app or a headless front end can read that instead of working out the tier itself.

What it will not do

Plan around these.

• It is time-based only. There is no “first 100 tickets at this price” trigger. If you want a limit on quantity, create a separate ticket type for the early bird with its own capacity. Once that ticket sells out it stops selling, whatever the date.
• One deadline in the editor. A second step, such as a late-bird price, needs the API.
• It only changes the price. Telling people the deadline is coming is your job, through your own emails and posts.

Early bird price or a separate ticket

There are two ways to run an early bird, and they solve different problems.

An early bird price on a ticket changes what one ticket costs on a date. Buyers all choose the same ticket, and the price they pay depends on when they buy. It is the right choice when you want a single ticket type and a deadline.

A separate early bird ticket is its own ticket with its own capacity. It stops selling when it sells out, whatever the date, and buyers see it as a different choice from the standard ticket. It is the right choice when you want to limit how many cheap places exist, the “first fifty” style of offer that a deadline cannot do on its own.

You can combine them, for example an early bird ticket that also carries a price window. Just explain to buyers what each one means, because two similar tickets with different rules is the easiest way to generate support emails.

A fuller worked example

The earlier example stopped at the subtotal. This one goes all the way to the total, with a booking fee and tax.

Here are the steps, with made-up numbers:

• The ticket normally costs 100, and the early bird price is 80.
• The buyer uses a 10 percent coupon, which takes the subtotal to 72.
• A 5 percent service fee passed on to the buyer is 3.60, so tax applies to 75.60.
• Tax at 8 percent, added on top, is 6.05.
• The buyer pays 81.65.

If you set the fee to be absorbed instead, it is recorded but not added to what the buyer pays, and tax applies to 72. If tax is set to inclusive, it is worked out as the part already contained in the price, not added on top. Those are settings in Pro, and it is worth running one test order to see your own numbers.

Choosing the discount and the date

There is no universal percentage that works. Pick a gap large enough that a buyer feels they got something for deciding early, and small enough that the normal price still looks fair afterwards.

The date matters more than the amount. A deadline that corresponds to something real, such as the day you have to confirm numbers with the venue, is easier to believe than an arbitrary Friday. If you extend it twice, the next one will be ignored, so decide once. Whatever you choose, write the deadline on the event page itself in plain words, with the timezone, so a buyer who misses it cannot say they were never told.

Mistakes to avoid

• Forgetting the timezone. Enter the deadline in your site’s timezone, and check that the site timezone is the one you mean.
• Setting the early bird price above the normal price. It is ignored, and the normal price is charged.
• Expecting it on free tickets. Free and donation tickets never use it.
• Leaving the end time blank. An early bird price with no end time is ignored.
• Assuming the deadline covers the whole event. The early bird price and its end time are set on each ticket, so a second ticket needs its own.
• Testing only once. Test before and after the deadline, with and without a coupon.

Test before you announce

Early bird pricing is one of those features that is simple to set up and easy to get subtly wrong, usually with the timezone. Before you announce anything:

1. Set the deadline a few minutes ahead and place a test order before it passes. Check the amount charged.
2. Wait until it passes and place a second test order. It should be at the normal price.
3. Try a coupon in the window and check that the discount is taken from the early bird subtotal.
4. Look at the order afterwards and confirm the amount matches what you expected from the arithmetic above.

If you sell several ticket types, repeat the test for each one, since each carries its own early bird price and deadline. Run it on a test gateway first, then set the real deadline.

Related

If you also expect to sell out, the waitlist guide covers what to do with the people in line. Event tickets lists everything the ticketing side does, RSVPs and waitlists covers the free-registration side, and Free vs Pro shows exactly which features need Pro. If you are running a larger event, the conference registration guide puts ticket types and early bird pricing in context.