Community Events & Tickets / Taxes / WooCommerce / Multi-Vendor Set Up?

[Alison]

I am really confused over the integration between The Events Calendar software, Woo Commerce and PayPal with respect to tax calculations on ticket sales.

I have the Events Calendar, Events Calendar Pro, Event Tickets, Event Ticket Plus, Community Events, Community Tickets and Filter Bar all installed on my site. I installed Woo Commerce so that I can enable my users who submit events and choose to sell tickets to them via Community Events using PayPal.

I am trying to set up my tax tables in Woo Commerce and I have no idea what to put in the tax table because I do not know how the tickets that I am enabling to be sold via Community Tickets are being pushed over to Woo Commerce. I know you guys don’t support Woo Commerce, but I still have a problem because I do not know how my Events Calendar suite of software tells Woo Commerce where both parties of the ticket sale transactions are located. For example. Lets say I have someone in the UK list an event via my Event Submission routine. And lets say they sell a ticket to that event to someone in Canada. I am assuming that Woo Commerce calculates the tax to apply to the event ticket sale, based on the tax tables I input into Woo Commerce so they make the purchaser, the Canadian, pay taxes based on whatever the UK laws on taxes are. But I don’t see anywhere in your documentation how your software tells Woo Commerce the location of either the seller or the buyer, for the purposes of determining how much tax the system should apply to ticket sales.

All of this difficulty I am having has made me wonder…. does Woo Commerce think of my site as being a single vendor site, not multi vendor because 1) I am not using the Woo Commerce multi vendor plugin (should I be?) and 2) I don’t see anywhere in the events calendar system I am running where ticket sellers are designated as vendors or how they indicate their own tax rates in the system. So I guess I have to do it for them? But there is only one tax table in Woo Commerce.

I apologize for how convoluted my message is and I hope that someone can explain to me the following. a) Based on the 7 products I am running from The Events Calendar, am I running a multi vendor site? b) If I am, how does Woo commerce know I am and who does Woo commerce consider to be the “seller”. Me, or the community event submitter? c) If I am not, multi vendor, what sort of site is my site? Is it single vendor, meaning I am the only vendor and the people who list events and sell tickets are not vendors? d) Based on all of that, how do I make sure taxes are being levied correctly?

I have to say that for the most part your documentation for your software is really top notch and exceeds expectations, but your documentation on setting things up with Community Events/Tickets and Woo Commerce and Pay Pal is pretty weak. I feel like it just tells me to read their documentation, but referring me over to Woo Commerce doesn’t help, because they have no idea how your side of the house is set up. Their regular old Woo Commerce documentation is for single vendor sites too (unless you buy their multi vendor plugin) so that is adding to my confusion. Its as if I am trying to apply plain old Woo Commerce (which is a single vendor solution) to the Community Events/Tickets, which I conceive of (perhaps wrongly) as multi vendor.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Alison

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Alison and welcome back!

Thank you for reaching out to us and for taking the time to provide a complete feedback.

We are sorry to hear about the confusion we might have unintentionally generated around taxes and Community events tickets while using WooCommerce,

I would love to help you with this topic and hopefully clarify the process for you.

Before I begin, there are couple of things worth nothing:

• You are absolutely right in your assumption. Everything pertaining to tax is 100% based on how your WooCommerce installation is configured.
• By default WooCommerce is not “smart”. In other words, it needs to be configured specifically for your situation (and applicable tax laws from your country and/or from the purchaser’s country).
• The good news is that there are fairly good how-to guides on how to configure WooCommerce available online (which is unfortunately outside the scope of the support we can provide here)

Every Community ticket is:

• A WooCommerce product. As soon as somebody creates a Community ticket, in reality, behind the scene, a WooCommerce product is created.

Everything that happens to that Community ticket at that point (stock management, checkout, sales, etc…) is actually happening to a simple WooCommerce virtual product.

You can actually see that product if you go to Products -> Products in your WordPress admin dashboard.

I do not know how my Events Calendar suite of software tells Woo Commerce where both parties of the ticket sale transactions are located.

This will depend on your settings in Events -> Settings -> Community (scroll down to the Community tickets section).

You might have read about this here: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/configuring-community-tickets/

Here’s a quick breakdown of the two main methods:

1. You process all of the money from the sales directly to your account. You are then responsible for paying the organizers outside of this process (although you and the organizers will have the same sales reports with the breakdown). This is the default setting.
2. You activate split payments (and configure things accordingly). In that case, the event Organizer has to provide the email address related to his paypal account. Everything still goes through the WooCommerce checkout process, but you each get paid immediately according to the ticket fee type rules you have defined in your settings.

But I don’t see anywhere in your documentation how your software tells Woo Commerce the location of either the seller or the buyer, for the purposes of determining how much tax the system should apply to ticket sales.

That’s a good question. As stated earlier, a Community ticket is nothing more than a WooCommerce product.

The information about the buyer will be captured by WooCommerce as part of the checkout process and the tax rules will be based on your WooCommerce settings.

In other words, once a customer starts purchasing tickets, WooCommerce handles everything else.

Does Woo Commerce think of my site as being a single vendor site

For this context, yes WooCommerce will see your site as being a single vendor site. That’s because you are really the only vendor on the site from a technical standpoint (even though you have many organizers “selling tickets” through you – the vendor).

I don’t see anywhere in the events calendar system I am running where ticket sellers are designated as vendors or how they indicate their own tax rates in the system. So I guess I have to do it for them? But there is only one tax table in Woo Commerce.

That’s because the ticket sellers are not the vendors (again from a technical standpoint), you are the only vendor.

WooCommerce can calculate taxes based on the setting of your choice. I would recommend using the following: https://docs.woothemes.com/document/setting-up-taxes-in-woocommerce/

 

For example, you might choose to calculate tax based on the shipping address or based on your webstore’s country of operation.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

 

[Alison]

Hi Geoff!

Thanks for your amazing response to my questions! It was really helpful to me! I have read over what you said and the links you provided and thought it all through and decided that I am not going to process any payments on my site. I’m going to let registered users submit their free and paid events to my site, but I am not going to hook up with WooCommerce or PayPal or sell any tickets on my site.

So, I have de-activated Woo-Commerce, Community Events Tickets and Events Tickets Plus. The flow is going to be that users register on my site, then they can submit their events, and in the Event Cost field they either type the word FREE or enter the cost. In the Event Website field, I will get them to put in the url of where people can go to buy tickets on their site. So this way, all the payment processing is done by the event organizers and I don’t do any of it.

Of course this means I don’t make any money off ticket sales, but thats OK, and my event organizers will probably like being able to keep all their profits. I am going to figure out other ways to monetize my site. So I have a 2 questions about customizing the Event Cost and the Event Website areas of the Submit Event form. 1) Can I add a custom field for “currency” to show up in the Event Cost section of the form, and 2) Can I have a line of text display beside or right below the Event Website field that tells them to enter the URL of where they want ticket buyers to go to buy tickets. If so, then I will figure out how to make that appear on the front end Event View. Right now it says “website”. I would probably change that to “For more information or to buy tickets, click here:”. Once I get that URL field working I am going to implement Google Tag Manager to see how often these links are being clicked so I can measure how much traffic I am sending to other sites.

One last thing… I am really happy with my decision to not do any payment processing and thankful for your helping me to decide what is best for my situation, but I have inadvertently caused some new problems by turning off Woo Commerce, Community Event Tickets and Event Tickets Plus. Essentially my system isn’t recognizing when I am logged in now. I am doing some testing and registering as a new user which seems to work. WordPress lets me register as new users. But when I go to the Submit Event screen it prompts me to log-in again, and then I get lost in this crazy loop of trying to log in and not being able to.

I use another plugin called Profile Press http://profilepress.net to handle my login/out, registration and password resets, and it has been working just fine, and I have not made any changes to it, so I don’t think its responsible for the failure to recognize me as being logged in, but I have opened a ticket with them in case.

While I wait to hear from them I thought I would ask you, is there some way my de-activinging Woo Commerce, Community Event Tickets and Event Tickets Plus could have messed up my site’s ability to recognize when users are already logged in?

Thanks you and have a great day!

Alison

[Alison]

Hi… me again

Good news! Half of my problem is now fixed! The problem with me not being recognized as logged in has been solved. I implemented a security certificate on my site, and didn’t realize that I had to change my custom menu links to be https in order for them to work properly.

I still have the following questions though:

So I have a 2 questions about customizing the Event Cost and the Event Website areas of the Submit Event form. 1) Can I add a custom field for “currency” to show up in the Event Cost section of the form, and 2) Can I have a line of text display beside or right below the Event Website field that tells them to enter the URL of where they want ticket buyers to go to buy tickets. If so, then I will figure out how to make that appear on the front end Event View. Right now it says “website”. I would probably change that to “For more information or to buy tickets, click here:”.

Thank you,

Alison

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Alison,

I’m glad my initial response was helpful to you and helped you make choices that work for you.
Kudos on fixing the login issues too!

I will happily continue to answer your questions.

Just to set expectations, as you might know, the scope of our support is mostly to get our customers started on the right track and to help them in case of issues. We unfortunately do not provide complete support for customization.

1) Can I add a custom field for “currency” to show up in the Event Cost section of the form

2) Can I have a line of text display beside or right below the Event Website field that tells them to enter the URL of where they want ticket buyers to go to buy tickets.

Yes you can. But this is a customization that you will need to tackle by either:

• Reading our Themer’s guide to get a sense of how to add that field. Some of our users have had success by adding custom fields to their forms
• Hire one of our recommended customizers to do the customization for you

I wish I had a better answer for you, but for now it’s the best one I have.

Best regards,

Geoff B.

[Alison]

Hi Geoff:

Sorry for not getting back to you for a few days. Thanks for the references on making the changes I want to make. I read the Themer’s guide and its over my head the way all the different php files work together. So I will look into getting a friend or developer to assist me.

Have a great evening.

Alison

[Geoff B.]

Hey Alison,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I do wish you the best of luck with the rest of your project.

Please know that you are welcome back on our support forums any time 🙂

For now, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

Geoff B.

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