How to Sell Tickets for Your Event

Selling tickets is not complicated, but the order you do things in matters more than most guides admit. Get the price and the capacity right at the start and the rest is administration. Get them wrong and no amount of promotion fixes it.

Here is the sequence, in the order it actually has to happen.

1. Decide the price, then decide who pays the fee

These are two separate decisions and people routinely make them as one.

Set the price first, on what the night is worth and what comparable nights near you charge. Then decide whether the platform fee comes out of that or goes on top at checkout. Absorbing it keeps your advertised price honest and tends to convert better. Passing it on protects your full face value and shows the buyer a bigger number than the poster said.

Either is defensible. What is not defensible is discovering the fee after you have set the price, which is how a night ends up making less than the spreadsheet promised. Work out the real cost per ticket before you publish anything - the arithmetic is here, and the fixed-per-ticket component is the part that bites on cheap tickets.

2. Set your tiers and your capacity

Capacity is a safety and licensing number before it is a sales number, so start from what the room actually holds.

Tiers do two useful jobs. Early-release pricing gives people a reason to commit now rather than decide on the day, which is the difference between knowing your numbers on Wednesday and guessing. And a small number of higher-priced tickets with something attached - early entry, a seat, a drink - raises your average without raising your headline price.

Keep it to two or three. A wall of ticket types reads as complicated and people bounce.

3. Put it on sale and treat the link as the product

Once it is live you have a link, and that link is what everything else points at. It goes in your bio, in the story, in the WhatsApp group, on the poster as a QR code.

Make sure it works from a cold phone. Open it yourself, signed out, from a message someone else sent you, and count how many taps stand between arriving and paying. If one of those taps is an app store, expect to lose people there - that drop-off is invisible and larger than you would guess.

4. Promote to the people who already come

Most first events sell to people who already know you. Post it where those people are, and post more than once - almost nobody sees the first one.

Promo codes are worth more than a discount here. Give a code to whoever is helping you fill the room and you find out which channel actually worked, which is information you keep for the next event.

5. Run the door

Decide in advance who is scanning and on what. A live guest list that updates as people arrive means the person on the door can see who is in without reading names off a printout, and two people can check in at once without double-admitting anyone.

Have an answer ready for a flat phone. A name on the guest list should be enough.

If the night needs staff - bar, door, sound, promo - sort that before the week of the event, not during it.

6. Afterwards

Check what actually landed against what you sold, deal with refund requests quickly while you still remember the night, and write down your numbers: tickets sold, when they sold, which code they came through. That last one is what makes the second event easier than the first.

Doing it on Tolivi

Set your tiers and capacity and the event is live with a page people can share. Ten percent a ticket, and free events cost nothing. No monthly fee, no listing fee, no contract and no minimum.

Every ticket carries a QR code, so you scan on the night and the guest list updates live. Your team can have their own logins. You can staff the night from the same place you sell it, and payouts go to your own bank account.

Guests do not download anything - they open your link, pay on the page, and the ticket arrives by email.

Put one event on and see what it does. That is the only way to find out what your room is worth.