Cancelling a ticket, multiple ticket discounts, attendies list

[mellowvision]

I’ve been building a system using Events Calendar Pro, WooTickets, woocommerce… All plugins are up to date as of today.

I’ve seen references in older threads about cancelling/refunding tickets being easy with version 3.0… but see no evidence of this. When I cancel an order, the ticket count does not return to the unsold state. There is a pull down that lets me increase the number of available tickets, but that doesn’t reduce the number of tickets sold. I can not find documentation on how this feature is supposed to work, but as of right now it is impossible to manage cancelled tickets.

Also, the attendies list does not seem to grow when I purchase a ticket. Does it not count sales by logged in site admin? Am I missing something here?

We also need a way to sell tickets at a discount when multiple tickets are purchased. I was consdering using the woocommerce dynamic pricing plugin, but have doubts that it will work with your ticket system. please advise. http://www.woothemes.com/products/dynamic-pricing/

Thanks

[Kelly]

Hi, mellowvision. I’m sorry to hear you’re having issues with this.

I saw your post over in the thread about recurring events. If lack of true recurring event functionality is a show-stopper for you, we would be happy to offer you a refund. On the other hand, if you can wait for us to implement it in an upcoming release, please rest assured that it’s a huge priority for us, and we’re definitely working actively to make it happen.

If you’d like to go ahead and continue using TEC, I can work with you on getting to the bottom of this. Our top priority is making sure we’re taking care of you as a TEC user.

[mellowvision]

Hi Kelly, thanks for the reply. At this point we’ve dedicated too much time to configuring TEC, and are committed to using it for this site launch. The site is for a small community art studio, so the development budget is really limited. The recurrence is really just one issue that is a hinderance to us, but we knew that going into this and chose to use TEC + woo + wooTickets as it’s Woo’s recommended combination of plugins for selling event tickets with woo. And I don’t mean to down play how nice a lot of TEC pro is. It has a lot of great features, and a lot of it is really easy to use. The people who will eventually be responsible for adding events and maintaining the calendar have been very happy with the plugins so far, our frustration has been mostly that we seem to come up against roadblocks we weren’t expecting, such as the attendee list not working, and ticketing not working as we thought it would from reading the presale materials and forum postings. We’re not seeking a refund, hopefully just some help. I apologize in advance for the long reply.

In my example we are using this combination of plugins to manage art classes and registration for a community art studio. We need a parent to be able to register their two kids for 2 different classes, and purchase tickets for 4 or 6 consecutive tuesdays. We are using recurrence for the events because they happen every week, but it forces the user to purchase 4 or 5 individual tickets, across several pages of calendar, to buy all the class tickets. In previous threads I have seen MT folks saying that they were actively working on recurrence for the 3.0 release, and while we can create recurring events, the tickets plugin does not recognize this relationship. We have 12 seats once a week for 6 weeks. We need the parent to be able to buy a 6 week block, register the attendee(s) and give us some additional info. When they purchase this, that needs to trigger the inventory to recognize there is 1 seat less on all 6 weeks, and add the attendee to all of the attendee lists. – even if we could just register an attendee for a a 6 week block, without a ticket, that would be useful, but as is is you can not.

We also need to capture registration information beyond the billing info. So we have had to add additional fields to the checkout page, for the parents to add the student name, age, emergency contact numbers, check that they agree to the release, etc. Unfortunately, this information is then tied to the SALE, not to the event attendees list, it’s a fractured system. and if the parent is registering 2 kids for different events they’re buying at the same time, it’s impossible to determine which kid is in which event. WooTickets ought to add a layer before the billing page, which prompts the purchaser to register for each event they’ve purchased tickets for. This way, they can only make a payment after registering their children and giving consent. Anyway, this is also less than ideal, because we are also using woo to sell art supplies for the students, so having the checkout page contain ticket-related fields (emergency contact, etc) is really confusing to the user. If I’m buying a paint brush, I don’t need to be prompted for a student’s name, or any other details. Registration info needs to be tied to each event.

We also need the reverse to happen smoothly. If a parent purchases a 6 week block of tickets, and then seeks a refund, it takes a LOT of work to manually go through the system and cancel each ticket, and add a ticket to the inventory to make it available again.

Here’s a list of the things we’re actively seeking solutions/fixes/workarounds (that won’t conflict with future updates) for, hopefully you can help us with a few of them.

– attendees list does not appear to grow when I purchase a ticket

– recurrence is not recognized at all by tickets.

– there’s no way to buy a ticket to every recurrence of an event without viewing every event page and adding each to cart.

– cancelled/refunded tickets do not properly correct the number of tickets sold.

– there is no “total amount of tickets” variable, which would make it easier to sell 4 tickets at a discount, on the same event page with single tickets for the normal price, without the use of coupons. Both the discounted tickets, and the individually priced tickets should still pull from the same pool of tickets. I’d like to be able to add 12 tickets, available at either price depending on how many are purchased. The variable pricing plugin for woo does not look like it’s going to work with tickets.

– there is no way to manage registrations for an event that require additional information. or to purchase tickets to an event for 2 different attendies

– there is no way to add an upsell product to a ticket the way I can to a product. (add art supplies for $15.)

[Kelly]

Hi, mellowvision. It really sounds like a frustrating situation for you. Unfortunately, a lot of this is a part of WooCommerce, and something that we don’t actually have control over from within our plugin.

I’m going to go through and try to hit your list one at a time:

1. Sometimes, depending on the payment method, WooCommerce requires you to go in and mark the transaction as “Completed” before it increments the stock and issues the ticket. The idea behind this is that if someone is sending you a check, you won’t want to issue them a ticket until you actually confirm that they have sent you a check.

This is part of WooCommerce and not something that we have control over. There is a third-party developer that, I believe, has a solution to automate part of this. You can check out their site if you’re interested: http://www.skyverge.com/

2. I’m sorry that the way recurrence works is so cumbersome. We really are working on it, but it’s such a paradigm shift that it’s a tremendous effort to make the change and then make sure we haven’t broken anything else in the process. Please rest assured that it is something we’re actively working on, we just don’t have a release date for it, and it won’t be in the next release.

That said, would it be possible for you to just offer one ticket linked to first event of the series, and then use that to have parents pay for the whole series?

3. (Please see #2.)

4. This is, once again, part of the WooCommerce functionality. The rationale here is that just because you’ve given someone a refund for something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the item goes back into your stock. My understanding is that this is the way it is with WooCommerce, but you may want to get in touch with them directly to see if they have a solution.

5. This is a tricky one. Could it be resolved with having a “series” ticket available for the first session?

6. Maybe you could advise people to put it in the “Order Notes” section at checkout.

7. As far as an upsell is concerned, the only thing I can think of is adding something to the email in the WooCommerce settings.

It’s not an ideal solution either, but you could consider looking at Eventbrite for event registration. In some ways, it’s more suited to your needs (with getting attendee info for each ticket), but in other ways (cumbersome handling of recurring events), it’s not really the right fit.

We’re happy to do what we can to help you succeed. Unfortunately, a lot of this is really outside the scope of WooCommerce Tickets and TEC.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about my feedback to you. Hopefully, it helps a little.

[Kelly]

Hi, mellowvision. Since it’s been a couple of weeks, I’m going to close this thread.

Please don’t hesitate to open a new thread if there’s anything else we can do to help.

[Support Droid]

This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

[Author]

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