Eventbrite
Connect Gift Up! to your Eventbrite account and we will enable your Gift Up! gift card codes to be used during checkout as an Eventbrite discount coupon, which acts as a gift card.
How to connect Gift Up! to your Eventbrite account
Head over to the Gift Up! integrations page and click "CONNECT" on the Eventbrite card...
You'll go through a process to authorize Gift Up! to be able to manage your Eventbrite account. All we'll be doing is creating a discount that matches the gift cards we issue for you (and making sure they can only be used while they are still valid!).
How Gift Up! works with your Eventbrite account
When you sell a gift card in your Gift Up! checkout we will automatically create a discount matching the gift card balance in Eventbrite that matches the gift card code that we create.
The gift cards/coupons in Eventbrite are eligible for use on any ticket and any ticket class.
The best way to test Eventbrite is connected to Gift Up! is to place a test order. When you do that, we'll sync the gift card as a discount coupon and because it's a test order that you created, we'll append a "-TEST" suffix to the coupon code in Eventbrite. So, if the test order you just placed issued a code of R8664, we'll sync that test gift card in Eventbrite as "R8664-TEST"
Of course, when a customer buys a gift card, we'll create a matching discount coupon in your Eventbrite account without any "-TEST" suffix!
Your customers can use the gift card by entering "R8664-TEST" in the Eventbrite checkout field labelled: "Enter promo code":
Orders placed for more than the gift card value
If they place an order for more than the value of the gift card, then they just need to pay the balance as normal during the checkout.
i.e.
$70 gift card, $100 order
minus
$70 gift card balance applied as a discount
========================================================
$30 balance to pay during checkout
$70 redeemed against the gift card, leaving a $0 balance
Orders placed for less than the gift card value
If they place an order for less than the value of the gift card then they will get the tickets for free, leaving a balance on the gift card to be used again later.
i.e.
$70 gift card, $50 order
minus
$70 gift card balance available, but only $50 is applied as a discount
==================================================================
$0 to pay during checkout
$50 redeemed against the gift card, leaving $20 balance
What about the remaining balance?
In the instance above, the coupon gets used up automatically by Eventbrite (as the original discount coupon was a one time use only coupon), but when the order gets placed in Eventbrite, we get notified, and we reduce the gift card balance in Gift Up! to $20 and immediately re-create the discount coupon with the exact same code again, but this time with a $20 balance so your customer can come along again and place another order and use their remaining balance.
Common questions
What Eventbrite plans does Gift Up! work with?
Gift Up! works with any Eventbrite plan, all the way from the Essentials plan to the Premium plan.
Do I pay fees twice? One for Gift Up! and one for Eventbrite?
No, you do not. When a customer buys a gift card through Gift Up! you'll pay our 3.49% fee (assuming you're on our Pay as you go plan). When your customer comes to use their gift card in your Eventbrite checkout, because the ticket sale gets discounted by up to the gift card value, you'll get charged Eventbrite's fee on the difference to pay (if any).
If the gift card covers the ticket value completely, Eventbrite does not levy a fee on the ticket sale. If the gift card only covers part of the ticket value, Eventbrite charges their fee on the difference, not the full ticket value.
I need to know which tickets were bought with a gift card
It's quite common to need to know the tickets that were bought using a gift card, for example, if you run a box office and need to pay out the show organizer the correct value.
To some degree, the Eventbrite Audit Report handles this for you. It will show the total Online Sales Volume and the ticket Face Value. Included in the Online Sales column are both tickets bought with a gift card and with a credit/debit card:
Why can my customers only buy one ticket at a time in Eventbrite?
By design, and for financial safety, when we create a discount coupon in Eventbrite, we specify that it can only be 'used once'. It's a setting that Eventbrite expose and what Eventbrite does is twofold:
- Eventbrite makes sure that the coupon can only be used against one ticket in a single order (i.e. stopping 2 simultaneous orders going through with the same code)
- But, as a result, Eventbrite only allows a single quantity ticket to be bought. i.e. when we specify "only allow one usage of this discount coupon", they interpret that as "only allow this discount coupon to purchase one ticket, once". This constraint is the cause of the behaviour you're seeing.
By setting the Eventbrite discount coupon usage limit to 1, we can guarantee that Eventbrite will not allow that coupon to be used more than once (they stop the coupon being used again this the second a ticket order is placed using that coupon). Eventbrite then tells us about the ticket order (this can take 5-10 seconds or more) and we process the coupon usage against the gift card record in Gift Up! by deducting the ticket value from the gift card's balance. Then, if there's any remaining balance we update the discount coupon in Eventbrite with the new balance and unlock it to be used again (by setting the allowed usages to 2, and so on).
This whole process takes 15 seconds typically, which ordinarily is absolutely fine and basically means that your customer (should they want to buy another ticket with their gift card) just has to place the first ticket order and by the time they come to place the order for their second ticket, we've already updated the discount coupon to reflect the new balance. Thus protecting you from over-redemption of the gift card.
If we were to set the 'max uses' of a discount coupon in Eventbrite it would almost certainly result in over-redemption, because if we set it to '2', for instance, then because of the way Eventbrite scopes the discount coupon use to be applied per ticket bought, as opposed to the entire total, then it's easily possible to use a single $50 gift card to buy 2 x $50 tickets in one transaction without paying anything via credit card; definitely not what you want! Which is why we set the 'number of uses' to 1. We are limited in this respect to how Eventbrite handles discount coupons, and whilst it's entirely reasonable from Eventbrite's point of view, it's not great from ours, and we would like to see the ability to specify an order discount, not a ticket one, but alas, it's not possible in Eventbrite.
We are actively working with Eventbrite to figure out how best to address this issue in their platform, but until we have a new solution we'll need to continue setting the max number of uses to 1 to protect you from overuse of a gift card.