Introduction
At Grenadine Event Management Software, we have many customers who regularly ask for an option to have attendees and prospective attendees pay through offline means. This is because customers (attendees) are sometimes corporations or organizations that don’t have a credit card, or don’t allow credit card expense accounts.
Event planners ask us if attendees could pay through one of the following payment methods:
- Send a check through the mail
- Send a wire transfer through their bank
- Pay in cash (in person)
- Pay through Interact e-transfer
- Send payment through intercompany transfer or other private means
- Send a transfer through other country-specific payment mechanisms such as Union, Tencent or Alipay
Although Grenadine supports a variety of online payment providers for registration, there’s no way to support them all, and of course, there will always be those who need to pay offline altogether.
For those situations, we have added the ability for customers to purchase tickets using “pay later”.
How Does a Registration Work with Pay Later?
When you select “pay later” as an acceptable payment method, your prospective attendee will go through a normal registration process, but they will not have to pay immediately. Your attendee will go through these steps while checking out:
- Select the appropriate ticket type or conference pass
- Click on the “checkout now” button
- Identify themselves
- Fill in all information, including any custom registration forms that you may have
- When in the “payment” screen, select the “pay later” button Pay later
At this point, Grenadine Reg will send an “order confirmation” both to the attendee and the event organizer. No ticket will be attached to the order confirmation unless a payment has been made or you have specifically opted to send tickets before payment. If no payment has been made, the order will be put in the “unpaid” state and the attendee will be informed of how they can send payment.
When you receive the payment, you can set the order status as paid to complete the order. From the Orders Sold screen, locate the order for which payment was received, find the Payment column, and click on “Mark as Paid”. The order will then be marked complete and the attendee will automatically receive another order confirmation with their tickets.
When to send tickets
By default, “pay later” sends an order confirmation to the person who ordered a ticket. However, it does not issue tickets right away. When you (the event organizer) confirms that payment has been received, tickets will then be issued and sent to the person who placed the order.
If you check the option “Send tickets right away, even when payment has not yet been received”, tickets will be immediately issued, without your confirmation that payment has been received. You still need to confirm receipt of payment, but it is not required to issue tickets. Use this option when you trust that your customers will send payment in a timely manner.
How Can I Set Up My Event to Use “Pay Later”?
To set up your event to use “pay later”, you must first contact us to purchase and add a prepaid registration credit to your account. Once the “pay later” feature has been enabled, you must turn it on for each event with which you wish to use it. Please note that we will charge $1/per ticket (or the equivalent in your local currency eg. €1) + 2.5% of the price of the ticket adding up to a maximum of $10 per ticket.
We require you to pay for a prepaid credit for this simple reason: when a customer pays using a credit card, Grenadine’s commission fee ($1/per ticket + 2.5% of the price of the ticket adding up to a maximum of $10 per ticket) is directly taken during the transaction. However, when your attendees choose the “pay later” option we are unable to receive this commission. That’s why we require you to put funds in your account which will be used to deduct the “pay later” commission fees.
If you have funds remaining in your account after the registration process is completed, they will be returned to you.