Early-bird event tickets
You can offer a discounted price for people that book your event early. When you publish your event you can simply set the ticket price according to your early-bird discount. You can add content to the body of the event explaining that these are early prices that will expire after a certain date.
The key thing to understand is what to do when that date arrives and you want to stop offering the early-bird ticket prices. You could just change the name and price on the ticket but, there are a couple of downsides to this.
- All bookings for that ticket will display the current ticket name. So it won't be quite as easy to see which attendees booked when the ticket had it's early-bird pricing.
- The aggregated revenue report for the event will be incorrect. This is calculated based on the current price of each ticket and the number sold. It doesn't look at the price paid at the time of booking.
So, a better approach to stopping early-bird tickets and transitioning to regular prices is as follows:
- Set up your early-bird tickets
- Clone these ticket types to create your regular price tickets
- Keep the regular price tickets hidden to begin with
- Sell the early bird tickets until they are all gone or until your specified date
- Hide the early-bird tickets and display the regular price tickets all at once
This will give you a much more tidy report to work with.
Note, you can even keep your event hidden during the early-bird phase if you want to offer access to only specific people at this time. To do this you can:
- Go to the event web page
- Click Event settings
- Uncheck Display in list of events
The event will still be accessible to anyone that has the direct link but it will not appear in the list of events on your website. You can then 'un-hide' the event when you are ready to start offering your regular price tickets.