Sell Event Tickets: Fill the Night Before It Happens

An event is the fastest way to turn a quiet Tuesday into a full room, and the slowest way to lose money if nobody turns up.

Selling tickets fixes the second problem by moving the money to the front. A supper club that is paid for on Friday is a night you shop for with confidence. The same supper club with a guest list and no tickets is a gamble on the weather.

Who it is for

Restaurants running supper clubs and tasting menus. Bars running quiz nights, tap takeovers and live music. Cafés running coffee cuppings, cookery demonstrations and launches. Anywhere with a room and an evening that is not earning.

How it works

1. Create the event. Date, time, capacity, price. Add an early-bird price with a deadline if you want the first tickets to move faster.

2. It appears where people are already looking. On your venue page, in the app, and on a link you can put anywhere — your own social posts, an email, a poster.

3. People buy tickets. The money reaches your Stripe account as they do.

4. You check them in on the night. A tap at the door, or a code your staff check. For a busy door, switch self check-in on and ticket-holders check themselves in from an hour before the start, so nobody queues to be ticked off a list.

When it sells out

A waitlist opens automatically.

This matters more than it sounds. The normal failure of a sold-out event is that three people cancel on the day and three seats sit empty at a dinner you already bought food for. A waitlist turns those back into paying guests without you chasing anybody.

If you have to cancel

Cancel the event and everybody who holds a ticket is told and refunded.

It is deliberately one action. Cancelling an event is already a bad day, and the thing that turns a bad day into a lost customer is a refund somebody has to ask for twice.

Pricing an event so it sells

The most common mistake is pricing an event like a meal. An event is not a meal — it is an evening, and people pay for evenings differently.

A €45 six-course supper club sells better than a €45 dinner, because the number is attached to an experience rather than compared against a menu. The corollary is that the description does the work: what they will eat, who is cooking, how long it runs, and whether there is a drink on arrival. A ticket page that lists a price and a date is asking somebody to take a risk on a Tuesday.

Early-bird pricing is worth using properly. The point is not the discount, it is the deadline: a reason to decide today rather than intend to decide later. Set it about a fortnight before, and make the gap big enough to notice — €5 off a €45 ticket moves people, €1 does not.

Run it again

The second time you run an event is much cheaper than the first.

You already know what it costs to put on, how long it takes, and how many people fit comfortably rather than theoretically. You also have a list of everybody who came, which is the asset the first night actually bought you — a monthly event with a returning core is a different business from twelve one-off events.

What to look at afterwards: how many tickets sold in the first 48 hours, how many in the last 48, and how many people came back from the time before. The first number tells you whether the idea works. The second tells you whether the deadline works. The third tells you whether the night works.

What it costs

• 4% of the ticket price
• €1.29 booking fee, paid by the customer on top of the price, not by you

Nothing monthly, nothing per event, nothing if the event does not sell.

A worked example

A bar runs a monthly quiz with 80 places at €10 a head, sold as teams.

That is €800 a night. Mosey's share is 4%, so €32, and the bar has €768 before Stripe's card fee, before the quiz starts, on a Tuesday that used to take €200 behind the bar. The €1.29 booking fee is paid by each team on top of the ticket price.

The quiz itself then sells drinks for four hours to a room that was previously empty, which is the actual return.

On refunds and the 14-day rule

You may have read that customers have 14 days to change their mind about anything bought online. For an event on a set date, that is not the case.

Dated leisure is exempt under Article 16(l) of the Consumer Rights Directive — the same exemption that covers concert tickets, flights and hotel rooms. Nobody can buy a ticket to your Saturday supper club and withdraw on the Friday under a statutory right.

What applies instead is your own cancellation policy, which you set and which the buyer sees before they pay. Mosey does not impose one and does not decide refunds on your behalf. Where you do want to refund somebody, you can.

What it connects to

• Sell gift vouchers — the other way to take money before service
• Reservations and deposits — for the nights that are not ticketed
• Mosey Tap — the door check-in, and the rest of what a guest is owed
• Private hire and large group bookings — when somebody wants the whole room
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page