Not every event should sell tickets at a fixed price. Charity fundraisers, community concerts, workshops that run on a pay-what-you-can model, donation drives, and experimental pricing tests all need something more flexible. The buyer names their own price – sometimes within a suggested range, sometimes with a minimum floor, sometimes completely open. It’s a small difference in the checkout flow that changes the entire psychology of the sale.
Tickera’s native checkout is built around fixed ticket prices because that’s what the overwhelming majority of event organizers need. But if you run charitable or community events, you probably want the flexibility. The good news: with Tickera Bridge for WooCommerce plus a small add-on, you can have it. Here’s how Name Your Own Price works in practice, when it’s the right tool, and what to watch out for.
When Name Your Own Price is the right model
There’s a reason pay-what-you-want pricing isn’t the default for most events. When people can choose their own price, some will pay less than you’d have charged them, and some will pay more. Whether the model works for you depends on your audience and the type of event. It tends to work well for:
- Charity and fundraising events. The price is the donation. Letting people give what feels right to them, within a suggested range, almost always raises more total revenue than a single fixed price. It also opens the door to big-hearted attendees who would happily pay double the sticker price if you let them.
- Community concerts and neighborhood events. Bands, small venues, and community organizers often want to make the event accessible to everyone – with a suggested price for those who can pay it and a lower floor for those who can’t.
- Workshops and classes on a pay-what-you-can basis. Creators, educators, and trainers who want to reach a wider audience while letting committed students or employers pay more.
- Tip-jar style add-ons. Sell a standard ticket at a fixed price, then offer a second “support the venue” product alongside it that lets supporters add whatever they want on top.
- Sliding-scale professional events. A conference with a student rate, a standard rate, and a “support a scholarship seat” rate, all expressed as open-ended contribution fields.
The common thread: the buyer’s willingness to pay is variable, and you want to meet them where they are rather than leaving money on the table with a single price.
How to set it up with Tickera
The setup has three pieces. None of them are complicated individually, but they do need to be in place before you start selling.
Install Tickera Bridge for WooCommerce
The Bridge add-on is what lets Tickera ticket types live inside WooCommerce as regular products. Once it’s active, anything WooCommerce can do – including flexible pricing – can be applied to your tickets. If you’re only running Tickera’s native checkout today, this is the first step. The Bridge handles all the heavy lifting: your checkout becomes the WooCommerce checkout, your ticket types become WooCommerce products, and your check-in flow stays exactly the same.
Install a Name Your Own Price plugin for WooCommerce
The WooCommerce ecosystem has several Name Your Own Price plugins. They all work on the same principle: when added to a product, they replace the fixed price field in the cart with an input box where the buyer types their own amount. The better ones also let you set a minimum, a suggested price, and a maximum, and they play nicely with the rest of WooCommerce (coupons, taxes, shipping rules).
Pick a plugin that’s actively maintained, has good reviews for checkout stability, and matches the WooCommerce version your site runs. Test the plugin by itself on a staging site before wiring it into a live ticketing flow.
Turn on pay-what-you-want for your ticket products
With both plugins active, edit the WooCommerce product that’s tied to your Tickera ticket type. In the product settings, you’ll see a new section for Name Your Own Price (the exact label depends on the plugin). Enable it, and configure the three numbers that matter:
- Minimum price. The lowest amount you’ll accept. For charity events, this might be the actual cost of running the event (venue, insurance, per-seat cost). For community events, it might be as low as a few dollars. Set this with care – it’s the floor below which you lose money.
- Suggested price. The amount pre-filled in the input box when the buyer lands on the product page. This is the single most powerful lever you have. Most people will accept the suggested number without changing it. Set it at what you’d be happy to receive for a ticket, not at the absolute minimum.
- Maximum price. Optional, and usually best left blank. The whole point of Name Your Own Price is letting enthusiastic buyers pay more than you’d have charged. Capping the upside is rarely what you want.
Save the product, add it to your site, and test a real purchase from start to finish – custom price, WooCommerce checkout, Tickera ticket generation, email delivery, PDF, and QR scan in the check-in app. Do not skip this step. Pricing plugins and ticket generation plugins both touch the cart, and a bad interaction only shows up at checkout.
Anchoring: the suggested price is doing most of the work
When you let buyers pick their own price, they don’t start from zero and negotiate upward. They look at your suggested price, and then they decide how much to deviate from it. The research on pay-what-you-want pricing shows, fairly consistently, that the average amount paid clusters close to the suggested number, with a meaningful chunk above it and a smaller chunk at the floor.
That means the suggested price, not the floor, is your real pricing decision. Set it too low and you leave money on the table for every single ticket. Set it too high and some buyers who would have attended will close the tab. A useful benchmark: your suggested price should be roughly what a traditional event with comparable value would charge as its main ticket tier.
Framing matters as much as pricing
A pay-what-you-want ticket that simply says “Name your price” performs worse than one that gives the buyer context. People want to do the right thing but they’re not sure what the right thing is. A short sentence near the price field – something like “Our suggested contribution is $25. We accept anything from $10 up, and every extra dollar goes directly to the food bank” – can make a measurable difference in average order value.
Be specific about where the money goes. Attendees pay more when they know the marginal dollar funds something concrete, not an abstract “event fund.”
Things to watch out for
Flexible pricing opens a few operational loose ends worth planning for before the first ticket sells:
- Payment processor fees. Most gateways have a per-transaction fee plus a percentage. A $2 ticket might lose 40% of its value to the processor. Set the floor high enough that the net revenue after fees still makes sense for the event.
- Tax rules. If you charge tax, make sure the plugin calculates it on the custom price, not on a zero base. Verify this in test purchases.
- Coupon interactions. Coupons applied to custom-priced products behave differently across plugins. Decide up front whether pay-what-you-want tickets are coupon-eligible, and configure accordingly.
- Reporting and receipts. Make sure the email receipt shows the price the buyer actually paid, and that your internal reports aggregate custom prices correctly. For charity events, this is also the line that will eventually end up on a donor’s tax receipt.
- Donation disclosure. If any portion of the ticket is a tax-deductible donation, your receipt language needs to reflect that. Talk to an accountant if the event has a registered non-profit behind it.
The short version
Name Your Own Price isn’t right for every event, but when it fits – charity, community, sliding-scale workshops – it consistently outperforms a single fixed price. Setup requires Tickera Bridge for WooCommerce plus a Name Your Own Price plugin, careful configuration of the floor and suggested price, and a real end-to-end test before you go live. Pay attention to the suggested price and to how you frame the ask. Those two choices, not the mechanics, are what determine whether the model makes money for your cause.
If you’re running Tickera for a charity or community event and you want to offer pay-what-you-want pricing, the Bridge add-on is the first piece of the puzzle. From there, any Name Your Own Price plugin in the WooCommerce ecosystem will integrate cleanly with your ticketing.
