Introduction
The Arts People pricing engine now includes the ability to configure pricing terms that permit a patron to select their own price for a ticket.
Pay-what-you-can (“PWYC”) pricing terms are configured with a description, a minimum and maximum permitted amount, and one or more predefined prices. All fields are optional. If specified, the predefined prices will be presented to the user first, along with a “Custom” option that will allow the user to specify any amount (between the minimum and/or maximum, if present).
Pay-what-you-can terms are configured in largely the same way as a base price; as such, careful specificity is important to ensure that the term only applies to tickets meeting the desired criteria when setting up pricing.
User experience
Pay-what-you-can pricing is applied via a modal or a page that prompts the user to select a price from one of the configured levels, if present, or enter a custom price.
Aside from some small differences in verbiage, the contents of the modal or page appear in more or less identical fashion regardless of buy path.
In box office sales
In Public Pages - (Note the use of “you” instead of “the patron,” and the
inclusion of a custom description / call-to-action below the title and the prompt.)
After performing the initial selection, the user is returned to the payment page (depending on context) and can proceed to complete the order or add more tickets. Each buy path gives the user the opportunity to redisplay the dialog in order to edit the selection.
Price selection is performed on a per-pricing-term basis. Therefore, if the user has selected tickets across different shows/performances but the tickets use the same PWYC term, the dialog will allow the user to edit the price for all tickets to which the term applies, regardless of other groupings. The dialog will always display a summary of the tickets for which the selection is being made and will also display a subtotal once the selection has been completed.
Pricing notes
If a ticket matches a PWYC pricing term, the term will always take precedence over any other matching price term. For example, if the ticket matches a base price, adjustment amount, or adjustment percent that brings its net price below that of the PWYC term’s minimum, the PWYC term will still apply and the user will still be prompted to select a price. This is by design and, besides, the aforementioned scenario should be relatively uncommon.
Ticket fees, order fees, and the cost of retail addon items are applied as configured, separately and in addition to the user’s selected price.
It is important to note that PWYC tickets handle retail add-on items differently from normal manual_price tickets, despite being stored internally as such. When a ticket is manually priced, the price entered covers all addons for the ticket -- in other words, the addons are effectively priced at zero. PWYC tickets automatically add the amount of all addons to the user’s selected ticket amount. This difference is taken into account on the data layer: normal manually-priced tickets attribute a $0 cost to addon items, whereas PWYC tickets treat add-ons as separate items that are priced as configured.
How to add a Pay-What-You-Can Term
- Start by navigating to the Pricing interface. Click on Add a term.
- In the “This row is a” field, select Pay-what-you-can price.
- Enter a description and specify a minimum and maximum price as desired. Click on the Save button adjacent to the “Please save this pricing term first…” text.
- Enter one or more suggested levels in the resulting table. Click Save after each.
- Complete any other pricing configuration as needed to add specificity to the term.
- Test the term to verify that it applies as expected.