Keir Whitaker - Publishing occasionally since 2008

Seb Lee-Delisle

I tried Amiando but it really didn’t work for me. I found their UI to be over complicated and confusing. Their telephone support hours are 9am-6pm in central european time, so useless if you have a problem in a different timezone (my workshops are all over the world). And if you want to refund a ticket you can’t do it yourself. You have to call Amiando but you don’t get a refund on any of the fees, not even Amiando’s!

I would recommend EventBrite – they also do card processing but have a way better UI (not perfect by any means but way better than Amiando). And if you ask them, EventBrite will also give you most of the funds before the event (I think they hold on to 25% until after the event). If you refund a ticket, they refund all the fees.

The only thing that Amiando has that EventBrite doesn’t is automatic VAT handling. This is really important to me, and if Amiando were as good as EB I would use them for that reason alone. But I had such a horrible experience with them that it’s just not worth it.

Hope this helps!

Seb

Keir Whitaker

Hey Seb – Thanks for the comment. It’s interesting to hear your experiences. I certainly agree that some of the UI could be improved.

My main point here was more to do with the potential PayPal problem as opposed to a direct comparison of the various solutions. If it wasn’t a problem I may well evaluate differently. Having re-read the EventBrite page it looks like any PayPal transactions do go straight into your account which could result in them retaining your revenue. By the looks of it their credit card processing does work in a similar way to Amiando.

I hear you on the refunds, UI and opening hours but speaking personally I would rather put up with those than have my cash flow frozen.

Terence Eden

I’ve been using Google Checkout to take payments (although, admittedly, not for conferences). Seems to work just as well as PayPal – people either already have an account or they can pay by Credit Card.

Fees are 3.4% + £0.20 for under £1.5K, then they drop.

Seb Lee-Delisle

@Keir, yep the main thing is avoiding PayPal and both Amiando and EB allow you to do that. :D

@Terence Google Checkout has worked well for me although it’s important to note that you can only accept payments in the currency for your account – so I couldn’t put my US workshops through Checkout. :(

Seb

Keir Whitaker

@Seb – Absolutely. I guess it then comes down to whether you want to actually offer PayPal as a payment option at all. If the answer is no then happy days! I know from speaking to a lot of friends and colleagues that they are really reluctant to not use it as for many people, especially web savvy ones, it’s a one click order process.

Thanks for chiming in, always great to hear other people’s thoughts and opinions.

marc thiele

With my last event in November (http://2011.beyondtellerrand.com) I started using Amiando as a test pilot. I also took a long time to compare Amiando and Eventbrite. For me the support of EB was way to slow. I think this was no matter of their bad support, but more that I am in Europe and they are in the U.S. I also urgently need the VAT handling Amiando is doing and EB just could provide with a workaround that was not very satisfying. I had a personal contact next to the usual support that was very fast and very friendly, calling me back directly after I wrote an email. So for me it did turn out really good and I am using them for btplay in April again.

Sure their interface is far from being perfect, but I collect feedback and give it to them and lots of the stuff I suggested already was fixed or added. And they are really thankful for this. I can’t compare it to the Eventbrite workflow, as I just tested EB with registering and playing around a bit and using them for a free event. So I can’t really compare Amiando to EB. I just say that – after following all the stuff that happened to the people you, Keir, are mentioning in your post, I will do my very best to avoid PayPal.

/marc

Simon Willison

My understanding is that the problem is more than just a large amount of money showing up in your account: I believe PayPal has specific policies that relate to tickets for conferences and events, and those policies involve holding back a large amount of the money until the event has finished. They do this because if the event is cancelled the attendees will go to PayPal to get their money back, and PayPal want to have enough of the event’s cash held in reserve to deal with that eventuality.

Think about this in terms of PayPal’s worst-case scenario: someone creates a fake event, sells hundreds of tickets, then runs off to South America with all of the money leaving PayPal to deal with the demands for refunds.

Keir Whitaker

Hey Simon – Thanks for your comment. You have certainly explained the reasoning much better than me!

It does make perfect sense for them to be cautious and it’s right for them to cover their bases. Fraud and chargebacks are a massive issue these days, especially online.

I think the arbitrary, at least it appears arbitrary, nature of the retention is what causes the issue. This and the fact that there appears to be a lack of good communication between PayPal and it’s customers in resolving the matter and ultimately handing over the remaining revenue.

Interestingly I know of a couple of non event, in these cases they were physical goods, based projects that have suffered similarly. I didn’t mention these as I am not sure how public that knowledge is so I am aware that it’s not a unique to the conference world issue.

Jon Moss

Fascinating reading Keir – thanks for posting. I went the Amiando route with both of the HDLive conferences I’ve run and have been very pleased with how they operate. I found the setup, whilst not pretty, was effective and I was up to speed quickly.