Feature Focus: Payment Plans
Make your event more affordable, accessible, and profitable by using LIVE IT's Payment Plan feature.
Affordability often goes hand-in-hand with profitability. By lowering the financial barrier of entry to your event, you can open your event up to a whole new set of customers who may have thought themselves priced out. You may also convert fence-sitters who needed an impetus to get booking.
This would normally require a change to your pricing structure and inevitably affect your bottom line - but it doesn't have to. By using LIVE IT's Payment Plans, your customers can secure their ticket for a specified deposit, and pay off the rest in automatic instalments.
LIVE IT Payment Plans are fully customisable - you're able to specify what the initial deposit should be, how many instalments follow, and when they are scheduled for. By using automatic payments we see a 98% completion rate, and depending on your policies, you can retain the funds from cancelled payment plans as well.
Read on to learn more...
How do Payment Plans work?
Customers make bookings as normal. If they select a ticket that is in a payment plan, they will be offered the option to pay in instalments.
The remaining balance is then paid off in monthly intervals. If the customer joins the payment plan after some instalments have passed, they will be rolled into the first payment.
Tickets will be issued automatically when the final payment is taken. If a customer has purchased other tickets not on the payment plan, they will be withheld until the final payment.
Customers will be emailed a payment schedule upon registration, and reminder emails before payments are taken. They can update their card details at any time.
Best Practices
You can set your payment instalments to be taken on any desired date, but we recommend setting them to the end of the month to ensure you're taking payments just after people have been paid.
Ensure you're clear on the event page what the payment plan entails. You can add extra text in the payment plan options about how it works. Check out this example.
Expand for some example text to include on your page
Secure your XXXEVENT NAMEXXX ticket today for just a 15% deposit and pay the rest off over 4 easy steps!
It's simple - Pay just 15% of the ticket price plus booking fee today to secure your ticket and we will automatically charge your card the remaining balance on the dates outlined below:
Initial payment - Charged immediately upon booking - 15% per ticket plus booking fee
2nd payment - 1st March
3rd payment - 1st April
4th payment - 1st May
Final payment - 1st June
We will send you a reminder two days before we take payment and you can update your payment details at any time. If a payment is declined, you will receive a notification email with the opportunity to try again or provide new card details.
Please note that if you fail to successfully meet your payment plan deadlines, then you will not be entitled to a refund.
You will receive your e-ticket once your final payment has been completed.
You can configure an event page to offer only the payment plan. If you're running a more complicated event like a festival, consider making a separate event page for your Payment Plans to keep tighter control over the tickets you'd like to make available, and to keep reporting organised.
Make sure to keep an eye on your customer-facing channels (email, social media) for enquiries from any customers who have missed payments, and need to be re-sent their payment schedule to resume payments. Likewise with people looking to cancel.
Decide what you'd like to do for customers who request to cancel their plans. You can refund funds paid so far, or hold on to their deposits for an extra bit of cash.
Get Started
You must be using Stripe as a Payment Processor. Create a new event and after initial set-up, select "Payment Plans and Deposits" from the left-side menu.
We'll have a pre-set payment plan ready to get you started, but get to customising.
For more detailed advice, check out this support article, or email support@liveit.io
