Event ticketing for bars and nightclubs — a year in

Most independent UK bars and nightclubs sell their events through a third party. Eventbrite, Skiddle, DICE, Fatsoma, Resident Advisor — pick your poison. Each one is good at its job. Each one takes between roughly 7% and 12% of the ticket face value before you see it, depending on the platform’s fee structure and whether the buyer or the venue is bearing the booking fee. Eventbrite publishes its fees openly and the rest are not far off.

For a 150-cap venue selling £8 advance tickets for a Saturday night, that fee is roughly £100–£140 in pure margin per Saturday. Over a year, that is the cost of a member of staff.

A year ago, we started rolling event ticketing inside ORDR — not as a separate app, but as a first-class object inside the POS that the venue already uses to take payments. This is the year-in retrospective.

What sits inside ORDR Events

The product is deliberately narrow. A venue creates an event, sets a price, sets a capacity, and gets a public URL with a Stripe Checkout flow attached. Customers buy a ticket on their phone. The ticket is a QR code emailed and SMS’d to the buyer. At the door, a member of staff scans the QR with the ORDR staff app — and that is also the moment the ticket-holder’s table opens automatically on the till, with the cover already paid.

Compare that to the third-party flow, where a Skiddle ticket and a venue tab have no relationship. The customer pays Skiddle. The customer arrives. The bouncer scans the QR on the Skiddle app. The customer orders drinks separately. The venue gets the door money two weeks later, minus 10%, and never connects the ticket purchase to the tab.

The thesis is simple: every ticket should be a pre-paid table. Once you make that the default, the rest follows.

What worked

Pre-paid covers reduce no-shows. Industry estimates for restaurant no-show rates sit around 20% in the UK, and a chunk of the cost of running a venue is reservation no-shows on a Saturday. When the cover is paid up front via an event ticket, the no-show rate collapses — we have seen it go below 5% in the venues that have switched their Saturday format to ticketed entry, though we will not publish those numbers without the venue’s permission. The pattern is consistent across the cohort.

The booking-fee question becomes simple. Most third-party platforms put the booking fee on the customer (“£8.00 + £1.15 booking fee”). When tickets are sold by the venue directly, the venue can choose: absorb the fee (better margins, less customer friction at checkout), or pass it to the customer (better top-line margin, marginally lower conversion). Either choice is now the venue’s; not Skiddle’s.

Door staff stop holding two phones. A small thing that turns out to matter. In the old world, door staff held the bouncer-cam, plus a Skiddle scanner app, plus a backup spreadsheet. In the new world, door staff hold the ORDR app, scan the QR, and the next thing they see is the customer’s table opened on the floor plan. One device, one workflow.

Refunds become normal. Refunding a Skiddle ticket means an email exchange and a delay. Refunding an ORDR ticket means three taps and a Stripe refund — done at the door, instantly. Stripe’s documentation on partial and full refunds is the underlying mechanism; the staff-app UX hides it.

What did not work as we hoped

Discovery is still a problem. Skiddle and DICE bring an audience. Selling tickets on your own URL means you bring your own audience — Instagram, mailing list, the venue’s existing customers. For a brand-new venue without a following, the third-party platform’s discovery surface is still a real benefit. We are honest about this: ORDR Events does not yet help you find new customers. It helps you serve the ones you have, better.

SMS deliverability in the UK is harder than it looks. Mobile networks throttle bulk SMS and TPS rules apply differently to “transactional” vs “marketing” content. We use Twilio, and Twilio is honest about the patchwork of UK rules around alphanumeric sender IDs. For the first six months we under-invested here and tickets occasionally did not arrive by SMS within seconds. Now we send the email as the source-of-truth and the SMS as a nicety.

Capacity logic is fiddly. A “150-cap event with 50 advance tickets and 100 walk-ins” is not the same as a “150-cap event with 100 advance tickets and 50 walk-ins” — and the difference matters at midnight when the door staff are deciding whether to keep selling. We added a waitlist mechanism for sold-out events in late 2023; we still get the occasional support ticket about the edge cases around capacity rollover for multi-day events.

When the third-party platforms are still the right answer

If you are running a single one-off festival with no pre-existing audience, Skiddle or Resident Advisor are still likely a better commercial bet — the discovery surface alone will outweigh their fee. ORDR Events is for venues that already have a recurring audience and want to keep the margin and the customer relationship.

If you need promoter affiliate splits, where multiple promoters share revenue from a single event, that is also a place we are not yet — third-party platforms have years of built-out affiliate tooling and we have not invested there.

For everything else — the regular Saturday club night, the gallery’s monthly opening, the comedy night at the bar above the kitchen, the supper club — selling tickets through the same till that pours the wine is the cheaper, faster, more honest way.

What ORDR does about this

ORDR includes event ticketing as a first-class part of the POS. Tickets are paid via Stripe at venue rates, scanned at the door from the staff app, and resolve into pre-paid tables on the floor plan. No per-ticket commission, no platform booking fee beyond Stripe’s own card-processing rate. The full feature documentation lives in the ORDR help centre, and if you would like a demo, get in touch via ordr.menu.