Market Day Collective Events Management

Guide For organisers Version 1

Pricing the
attendee side

Everything an attendee might pay for, and how to set each price so it covers what it actually costs. Entry, meals, drinks, creche, bundles and anything else you decide to offer. The companion to the stall fee guide: that one prices the sellers, this one prices everybody who walks through the gate.

Every type carries a name, a description, a price, a quantity available and a sales window. Set the quantity honestly: a type that sells out is better than a day that oversells its floor.

The cooks build the menu and the cost per serving first. Then the price is set with a margin. Only then does it go on sale. Nothing is published at a price somebody guessed.

The margin is not profit. It is the rest of the kitchen. An item priced at ingredient cost plus a little is a service that loses money, because a kitchen has costs that belong to no single scone.

Spread the overheads across the expected servings for that service, and the per item picture becomes honest:

Where expected servings are low, the overhead share per item goes up. That is why a small service has to charge more per item than a big one, and it is better to see it on the screen than to find it in the accounts a month later.

Cost it the same way, then add the things people forget: cups or bottles, ice, the power to run a fridge all day, and the card fee. A drink is the easiest item to under-price because the ingredient cost is so obviously small that the rest gets ignored.

Two practical decisions that affect the price. Whether drinks are collected with the meal, which costs nothing extra in labour, or sold separately, which needs somebody standing there all day. And whether free water is available, which it always should be, and which is a cost line rather than a lost sale.

A creche pass is a payment and a place, not a booking system. It buys the right to leave a child at the creche at any point during the event, at a rate per child. The people running it sign children in and out their own way.

What pre-selling it gives you is the two things a volunteer at a folding table cannot easily do: the money, and the count.

Entry, a meal and a drink as a single price. They lift the average spend and they turn a ticket into a forecast, because the meal and the slot are chosen at purchase.

The cap on a bundle is the kitchen's, not the gate's. It stops selling when the collection slots are full, even if tickets remain, because a meal inside a ticket is an order somebody has to cook.

And it raises your exposure. Eighteen dollars held against refund instead of five. If the day is cancelled after the kitchen has shopped, the ingredients are a real loss rather than a refund, because they were bought. Know that date, and say it to yourself: after the shopping day, cancelling costs you the food as well.

How to cost one. Same method as everything else, with one extra line most people forget.

Roughly 1.75% plus 30 cents a transaction. The percentage barely matters. The fixed 30 cents is what hurts, and it hurts most on the cheapest things.

The practical answer is fewer, larger transactions. One order covering the family's meals, drinks and creche is one fee. The same family buying four things separately is four. That, rather than the margin, is the real argument for pre-ordering everything in one go.

Set each cap separately. A day that sells three hundred tickets and two hundred meals has not oversold anything, so long as it knew that when it published.

Market Day Collective takes 25% of whatever is left at the end, and bundle and pack income counts as ordinary trading income for that. Put it in your sums while you are sketching.