Collecting fees

There are three ways to collect fees from ticket sales. The default option is to have all ticket sales collected via your e-commerce engine (WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or Tickets Commerce). You can then divide up the money as needed.

With this method, it is your responsibility as the site admin to pay event organizers – by whatever method you prefer. You can use the sales data for each event to track how much is owed to the organizer and how much you have earned in fees.

Split Payments

The other two options are to enable split payments, which divide up each ticket sale according to your fee settings and immediately pays the site admin and the event organizer via PayPal.

When tickets are sold, you will automatically receive payments to the PayPal address defined in settings.  The amount you receive depends on the fees you’ve defined in the main Community Tickets fee option settings.

The event organizer will also receive automatic payments for their part of the sales. With split payments enabled, the organizer will be required to fill in a PayPal address as part of submitting an event. Selecting Payment Options here will take you to a link similar to http://yoursite.com/events/community/payment-options.

The organizer will then fill in their email address tied to their PayPal account and view the site fees as set by the administrator.

? Note:If you have enabled Split Payments but haven’t finished configuring your PayPal settings, links to reports won’t show on My Events.

PayPal Payouts API

This is processed separately from your payment gateway. You can use any WooCommerce payment gateway. When the order proceeds to completed status, you will get a payout created and queued up to be paid via PayPal while the remainder of transactions remains with your preferred payment gateway.

To learn more on configuring your Payouts API, please see PayPal’s support.  It is worth noting, PayPal doesn’t implement rate limits unless they suspect abusive traffic.

Payouts API Order Flow
Triggering the Payouts API

You can trigger the queue processing on-demand by using this WP-CLI command:
wp cron event run tribe_community_tickets_payouts_process

Handling Refunds

To be able to issue refunds, we recommend that you do not mark orders as complete until the event occurs. Once an order is marked as complete, payments are sent to organizers. Refunding tickets will not recover the payouts already sent to organizers. You could try to dispute that specific transaction with PayPal and say you did not receive what was paid for. However, we are unable to assist further with this step.

Deprecated PayPal Adaptive Payments

It’s important to note that this functionality is currently based on PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API which was recently deprecated. If you do not already have a live, approved Adaptive Payments account then you may no longer be able to acquire one. Paypal is deprecating Adaptive Payments in favor of the Payouts API method.

If you already have a live, approved account however then you can enable split payments on the Community settings page. You will need to use a WooCommerce payment gateway that the customer would use to make their purchases. For more help, please refer to our overview on Adaptive Payments and also  PayPal’s support.

Are Split Payments Right For You

We can help you decide.

Pros:

  • As a site admin, you have no responsibility to handle or distribute funds
  • Community organizers get paid immediately with no action from the admin

Cons:

  • Split payments are more work to set up and require a PayPal developer account
  • Refunds and canceled events are significantly more difficult to handle. Refunds are deducted from the site admin’s total, with nothing taken from the community organizer’s profits.

Understanding Site Fees

Be sure to check out the Site Fees article to get your payments completely set up.

We hope this helps you configure payments on your site for you and the organizer. But hey, we know it’s a complicated thing to wrap your head around, so head to our support page if you still have a question and we’d be happy to help!