How to price a ticket in Lagos

Work backwards from the bill

A ticket price is not a mood. Add up what the night costs before anybody walks in: the venue, the sound, the security, the generator, the artist, the people who will stand at the door. Divide by the number of tickets you honestly expect to sell at that price, and add a margin for the tickets that will not sell at all. That number is your floor, and everything below is a decision about how many tickets you are willing to sell under it.

The two mistakes worth naming are both about that floor. A price set by what a similar event charged is a price set against somebody else’s cost base. A price set from the headline artist’s fee alone forgets that the room, the sound and the staff are not optional and do not scale down with attendance.

The fee sits on top, which changes the arithmetic

On Tickus the processing fee is paid by the buyer, on top of the ticket price, and it is shown as its own line at checkout in naira before anything is paid. You are credited the full ticket price. So a ticket at ₦10,000 adds ₦10,000 to your wallet, not ₦10,000 minus a commission.

That matters to how you price: a platform that deducted its cut from your price would make your floor a number you divide by, and you would have to inflate the price to land on the figure you actually need. Here the price on the page is the number that reaches you. The rate is a platform setting rather than a constant in a page, which is why pricing states the structure and lets the checkout print the naira amount.

Two prices beat one, and you do not need two event pages

A ticket type is a row with its own price, its own stock, its own sales window and its own limits. That is enough to run an early bird and a standard price on one event:

• Early bird. A lower price with a small stock, and a sales window that closes whether or not it sells out. The stock is what makes it scarce; the window is what stops a cheap ticket being available to somebody who hears about the event late.
• Standard. The price the night has to average. It goes on sale from the start, or opens when the early bird closes, depending on how you want the page to read.
• Guest list. A free ticket is a price of zero, and it still has stock, so a list of forty is forty named passes rather than a promise. There is no payment step and no fee, because there is nothing to collect.
• Table or group. A minimum of two or six per order on a table tier means the table sells as a table rather than as six separate seats somebody else can take.

The limits are per ticket type rather than per event: a maximum of one per buyer on a very cheap tier, a minimum of two on a table. And if your venue is sold in named sections, a ticket type can belong to a zone with its own capacity, so a section sells out on its own counters rather than on arithmetic done twice.

What the buyer compares

The directory shows a “from” price and whether a type is sold out, so a buyer scanning a list sees your cheapest live ticket beside everybody else’s. That is the argument for making the entry price the honest one: a ₦2,000 early bird that exists for six tickets makes your event look cheaper than it is, and the buyer notices at checkout where the fee is printed as well.

Round naira figures read better than pre-scaled ones. ₦5,000 and ₦10,000 are numbers a person can carry in their head while deciding to come; ₦4,999 reads like a market stall and saves you one naira.

A price is editable, and a sold ticket is not

Editing a ticket type is allowed, and it is the right response to being wrong about demand: raise the standard price after the first week, close a tier early, add stock to the tier that is selling. What you cannot do is re-price a ticket somebody already bought, so make the change on a type rather than by editing an order, and let the page show the new number to the next buyer.

Before you announce it

Publish the event, open your own page on a phone, and read the checkout the way a buyer will: the ticket price, the fee as a separate line, and the total on the button. If the total is a surprise to you, it will be a surprise to them. How it works covers what happens after the payment, and pricing covers what the platform charges.

Other guides

• Check-in without a network

  How the gate keeps scanning with no signal: a signed pass list on the phone, admissions queued on the device, and one rule the server still enforces.

• Getting into the directory

  What makes an event appear on the directory and its city pages, why an unpublished draft is invisible, and what the city and category hubs need to be indexed.