Duplicated/Triplicated Tickets

[Adam]

Hi there,

I’ve been having an issue where customers are receiving 2-3 times as many tickets as they have ordered, however we can’t seem to replicate the issue – either on our live site or a staging site – to find out what’s wrong.

Obviously deactivating plugins/theme would be our first move, but myself and my tech haven’t been able to replicate the issue –
even with all plugins activated as of yet.

The majority of times the tickets are duplicated/triplicated are when customers order multiple tickets (eg order 3 tix receive 9 tix). Single ticket orders don’t seem to be affected, but I’m not sure if that’s just due to chance.

Each extra ticket has a unique security code and is able to be checked in. The extra tickets show up on the “Tribe Attendees” section (eg customer has 9 tickets), but not on the “Tribe Orders” section (eg customer bought 3 tickets).

More than happy to load up a staging site for you to take a look if you wish, but first of all I was wondering whether you’ve had any customers with similar issues, and whether they had any luck fixing it. I’ve looked through the forums and the tickets I’ve seen didn’t seem to be too conclusive.

Thanks for your help and hope to hear from you soon.

Adam

[Victor]

Hi Adam!

Thanks for getting in touch.

That surely is a strange issue you are having. Let me try to help you with the troubleshooting.

As a first step, please make sure you are using the latest versions of our plugins. Remember you can always get the latest versions from your downloads page > https://theeventscalendar.com/my-account/downloads/

Please enable WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG ? This will create a debug.log file inside the /wp-content directory.

After that, try reproducing the issue a few times or if you can’t reproduce yourself, wait until you experience the issue, so that in case there is an error, it will be saved into the debug.log file. Please share that log file with us so we can see if any problem from there.

Could you please send us a screenshot of one of those duplicate orders when on the edit order screen in a private reply? Make sure to include the order notes.

Are you getting duplicates for several events or just one in particular? Is it for just one ticket or different ones? Please share a link to the events you are having the issue with.

Are the duplicated tickets included in the same ticket email? For example, 3 ticket purchase sends 9 tickets in a single email?

Let us know about that.

Thanks,
Victor

[Adam]

This reply is private.

[Victor]

This reply is private.

[Adam]

Hey there Victor,

I can’t believe I missed your message. Two techs I’d hired were also stumped, so we decided I rebuild the site from the server up and hope the problem goes away… =/

We have removed Dokan, which may have been conflicting (we will never know), and because Community Tickets has its own marketplace-style setup, including adaptive payments.

With the rebuild, I am using Paypal Express (and soon Adaptive Payments) instead of regular Paypal plugin, so referring to below link, will IPN/PDT issue will not apply here?
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/ipn/integration-guide/IPNPDTAnAlternativetoIPN/

Is it possible that ETP was getting more than one “payment approved” message from Paypal (because of IPN, or both IPN and PDT) and generating multiple tickets in the order? If this is the case, would it be possible to put in the pipeline that it needs a fix? I wouldn’t ever wish this on anyone.. It has been hell – a lot of annoyed customers, a very angry client, a number of free tickets to customer (to apologise for error), manual data entry/checking, and then there were the costs for the two techs who were stumped. I just hope our site rebuild will mean no further issues with the plugin… So if any action is able to be taken to lead to an eventual fix it’d sure be appreciated! I’d hate for anyone in the situation in future to have have to go through it.

Anyway back to business, next up, it says PDT sends confirmations once and only once. Would this explain why, sometimes, even though I have the autocomplete orders snippet in my functions.php, I still had to go through and manually complete orders occasionally?

The Paypal dev article also says there is “material lag”; I imagine it would only mean a few seconds. This is fine with tickets as you would appreciate – I mean anything up to 5-10 minutes to send tickets isn’t really an issue.

I don’t know how to code, and don’t know the inner workings of what “triggers” ETP to generate the tickets for an order so am very hopeful, in attending to this IPN/PDT issue, we won’t experience the issue again. Moving forward, would you recommend IPN is turned off and to use PDT only, or perhaps visa versa – if that is possible? As I’m not sure of the logic behind the tribe plugins generating tickets the way they do, I’d appreciate Tribe’s collective advice here.

Finally, I have taken your advice and set “WooCommerce Support” settings (wp-admin/edit.php?page=tribe-common&tab=event-tickets&post_type=tribe_events) only to “completed” and “completed”. I am hopeful it will also help with these scenarios:

In the past, I would put, say, 100 tickets on sale, and we’d never sell exactly 100 tickets.. It would always be something less, like 91 tickets. These 9 tickets would be “cancelled orders” – orders that user has put into their cart, gone through to pay but hasn’t completed payment. These extra tickets would also show up for the user in mywebsite.com/abcevent/tickets/, albeit with “cancelled” next to them. Although the ticket says “cancelled”, next to it, there’s not really been a way to prevent it from showing – besides manual deletion from back end (I think?).
It would be great if these incomplete orders instead go back into available tickets – or even better aren’t generated in the first place, so we actually do sell the 100 tickets.

In that scenario, if I have selected “completed” and completed” (wp-admin/edit.php?page=tribe-common&tab=event-tickets&post_type=tribe_events), would it be safe to say that this wouldn’t occur and we’d go through the full 100 tickets?

Final scenario: there is a rush of tickets, and one ticket is remaining. Two different users add that one ticket to their cart within a few seconds of each other and complete checkout.
Would this explain why we sometimes have more than 100 tickets being sold, say, 103? A few extra tickets oversold doesn’t bother me, but it would be good to know the cause.

Many thanks Victor,

Adam

[Victor]

Hi Adam!

Thanks for following up with this.

I’m truly sorry you have experienced all those problems.

It’s a good guess that IPN/PDT are breaking things, but we do already have code in place to ensure that tickets aren’t generated more than once for the same order, so of course this shouldn’t be happening. Other code or customizations could be stopping Event Tickets Plus from gathering the information it needs to do that test, thus causing duplicate tickets.

would you recommend IPN is turned off and to use PDT only, or perhaps visa versa – if that is possible?

I think both are viable options and can be supported – it’s not a case of choosing one over the other necessarily, and neither route should cause duplication.

it says PDT sends confirmations once and only once. Would this explain why, sometimes, even though I have the autocomplete orders snippet in my functions.php, I still had to go through and manually complete orders occasionally?

I think that is a possibility. In my opinion, the autocomplete orders snippet you are using is not perfect and might fail to work under certain scenarios like that.

if I have selected “completed” and completed” (wp-admin/edit.php?page=tribe-common&tab=event-tickets&post_type=tribe_events), would it be safe to say that this wouldn’t occur and we’d go through the full 100 tickets?

That really depends on each particular order. For example, if one ticket order is set to completed (thus creating the tickets) and then changed to cancelled, you will have to consider the stock count. Let me point you to a couple of articles on how to refund and cancel tickets orders > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/refund-cancel-tickets-order/ and managing orders and attendees > https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/managing-your-orders-and-attendees/

Two different users add that one ticket to their cart within a few seconds of each other and complete checkout. Would this explain why we sometimes have more than 100 tickets being sold, say, 103?

I guess this is a possibility, but stock handling is done by WooCommerce, and I’m not really certain as how it would handle that specific case.

I hope that helps! Let me know how that goes and don’t hesitate to ask any follow up questions.

Best,
Victor

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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