Following a recent FTC mandate, we were required to update how processing fees are calculated when passing fees to buyers. This update may cause some orders to show a small remaining balance. If you see this, we suggest choosing the “Do Not Charge” option to resolve the discrepancy.
This only affects event pages where "passing fees on to buyers" is enabled.
What happened?
On May 12th, 2025 a new FTC ruling required all event ticketing platforms to change how they display pricing for live events on event ticketing pages. This ruling required us to make a small change on how we calculate certain fees in order to be compliant with the ruling.
With the calculation change, it introduced an issue that occurs when you make an edit to an attendee who reserved tickets before the ruling took effect. When editing attendees who reserved tickets prior to the ruling, the system will suggest charging the attendee a penny and possibly up to 15 cents or more.
This is because the attendees paid at time when the the old calculation was used and when editing them now, the new FTC compliant calculation is being used. This is not something we are able to prevent based on the new ruling that enforces a payment processing calculation.
More technical explanation and background on the ruling
This ruling is designed to stop certain big ticketing companies from bait and switch practices that load massive fees at the end of checkout. While written to prohibit bad practices by these certain ticketing companies, this ruling has implications for all event organizers and all ticketing companies.
Prior to the ruling, passing on fees to buyers used a payment processing rate of 3.5% + 30 cents. The new ruling requires event organizers to show exactly what buyers will pay for tickets, inclusive of all fees, and prohibits changing of the total before checking out. This created a problem with the 30 cent fee for payment processing because 30 cents is not equally divisible across all options on a ticketing page.
In order to be compliant with this ruling, the 30 cents for payment processing has been removed and the blended payment processing rate for passing on fees is 3.5% flat on all items on a ticketing page to be compliant.
That means some attendees will have fees calculated with 30 cents and some without it. While we are able to mitigate this discrepancy in most cases, occasionally some attendees are shown being under charged by some pennies. We suggest selecting the "Do Not Charge" option when encountering this.