In our plan this year to re-institute ticketing fees (not my choice!), our organization was interested in the idea that our per ticket fee ($3) would have a cap, in an attempt to not discourage our multi-performance, multi-genre big buyers. We settled on a cap of $16 (per order...so no more fees after purchasing 6 tickets). After we came up with this grand plan, it was discovered that currently there is no straightforward way to cap a fee in fee setup. I have been told about the method in using pricing layers and a pricing rule for this to work, but the setup seems a little tedious- and I'm not sure how flexible the fee would be if built that way (ie: we would need an easy way to waive the fees in some scenarios).
I was really convinced that surely someone would have a developed a customization to make a fee cap, but Tessitura Consulting has told us that they are unaware of a customization like that. SO I come to the forums....is there anyone out there who may have customized something on their own like this? Or if you have your own workaround version and/or can reassure me that the setup using a pricing rule is actually not so bad.
I really feel like a fee cap is not a totally unicorn thing.
PS- More info on our fees- they would apply to all MOS, to everyone. No exceptions for donors or if you purchase in person. Everybody pays. Also, we use TNEW.
Katie - we're in the same boat beginning our 2019 season. We're having to code our website (custom, not TNEW) and our box office staff are manually calculating handling fees & tax on fees if it reaches the cap.
Gosh, that just seems like a headache. Is there a reason you didn't choose to try to use price layers and a pricing rule to trigger the cap?
Yes, because as you said, you can't override the fees if necessary and our highest level of membership does not pay fees so it's just not possible to use layers.
Actually- I just looked at it closer. You can adjust the fee price layer in the Price Dtls window. I made the minimum price for the fee $0 so that you can completely eliminate the fee charge. So that might solve that problem?
Now I'm just wondering how we can make it reflect accurately online.
Good point. Our staff are so used to dealing with fees though that I think it's the better way for us until such time as Tessitura comes out with a way to do this.
The only thing that occurs to me for the website is a checkout customization. That should be able to work for both a separate ticket for or a fee layer. The advantage/disadvantage with a fee layer is that it is not broken out from the ticket price online.
But either way will involve some decent customization work, and, more importantly, will not show up until the checkout page... which does little to discourage the big buyers if they never get to that page but instead get frustrated when they see all the fees in the cart. Though you WOULD be able to employ messaging through that checkout customization to alert the patron to the ticket fee cap if you wanted to do so.