Incorrect Attendee Count

[Sarah]

As far as I can tell there are 4 places that report the number of tickets sold and attendee’s for each event.
1. The main event page that list all events under the Attendee column there is a number sold and percentage.
2. When I click on the attendee number link on the main event page, a new page opens of a list of attendees and at the top there is a small breakdown of sales.
3. On this attendee page if you click on the Orders tab there is another total breakdown.
4. On the attendee page if you click on the PayPal tab there is another total breakdown.

The 4 numbers sometimes match and sometimes do not. For the most part if there are any returns or cancelations then the number do not match. A couple of months ago I did some spot checking when I’d return an order and it was on point. You plugin returned the inventory stock so it seemed to adjust accurately. I’m not sure what has changed in the last couple months but I am calculating my events by hand and having to manually adjust the stock now. This just doesn’t seem acceptable.

While troubleshooting I discovered my Event Calendar settings changed, I’m not exactly sure how but they changed from only creating a record during the Processing stage and sending an email to the customer after an order has been Completed. To creating a record when a customer adds to the cart and the order becomes Pending. This created a problem because orders were getting created twice sometimes (and taking from inventory twice) when they were Pending and once when they were Completed. Although my stock handling settings have always been and has never changed “Only decrease available ticket stock if an order is confirmed as Completed by PayPal”.

Out of habit if I refund an event I have moved them to trash because my client is not very technical and can accidentally add them to her hand written list, but deleting the “irrelevant” orders are not working to update the attendee numbers (as suggested by your KB).

We do not use shared capacity. I read your KB and tried to put a zero under shared and keep my count of 55 but when I put zero the box outlined in red and I received “Shared capacity ticket types share a common pool of tickets for all attendees” and I was unable to save changes, so my settings are still “Set capacity to 60 only”.

I’m not sure how to proceed to get the attendee number to be more accurate. The major issue arose when I got an email from a valued repeat customer asking if one of our events were sold out because they could not register. By the numbers on the main page and Attendee list, we had sold out and of course I reported we sold out. I exported the list to finalize it for my client and noticed we were not sold out. We still had 6 open seats. Then I checked two other events and noticed they were both having the same issues.

I have a test site I could perform test but because I have Ticket Plus and Event Calendar Plus and I have only paid for keys on the main site and I do not have a test site key.

As you only limit 4 images I added a share link from a Google drive folder with more screen prints at the bottom of my System Information details.

[Jennifer]

Hi Sarah,

I’m sorry that you’re running into this issue, but I’ll be happy to help you out.

Just to clarify that I am understanding the issue correctly, the settings had been changed to create attendees early (when tickets were added to the cart) resulting in duplicate attendee records, which it sounds like you tried to delete, but the number available was not updating to reflect the deleted attendees – is that correct?

First, I do want to point out that the number sold will not change, even when an attendee is deleted. However, deleting an attendee should increase the available tickets by 1. For the attendees that were created while the settings were set to generate attendee records when the tickets are added to the cart, you would need to delete those duplicates or erroneous entries manually.

If you’ve changed the “When should attendee records be generated?” setting (under Events > Settings > Tickets > WooCommerce Support) back to “Completed”, then you shouldn’t be getting any more duplicates going forward.

If you tried to include a link, unfortunately it did not come through. One other thing I noticed – can you verify that you are selling tickets with WooCommerce? It looks like you also have Tribe Commerce enabled, so I just want to make sure we are on the same page there!

[Sarah]

Hi Jennifer,

I am a little confused because in another KB it expressed to issue tickets using the Tribe commerce setting that would need to be setup in Event Settings and selected in the settings of each event. And that did work. Only recently did the tickets stop sending out.

I think your understanding is correct. I did not realize that no matter if you delete or refund the sold number does not change. Even still there should be available tickets. E.g. For our Diabetes event we had selected a capacity of 55 tickets. I have performed 5 refunds. The event stopped allowing folks to register and stated on the Event page attendees column 100%. I was excited reported we were sold out, sent out a post to notify other customers. A couple days later I exported the list to prepare the list of attendees for our Event Coordinator and counted there were only 49 attendees. Apparently one person had canceled their order during checkout process and the 5 refunds I made for conference changes.
To me it looks like your math in the plugin is counting off the number sold verse the available seats. Is this true?

My settings were set to create an account in Processing and email the customer when completed. My setting have always been send customers tickets when completed.

I didn’t want to change the setting from processing to completed because I have MailChimp setup to ping people when they add the item to cart but don’t buy it. But I’ll try it if it will limit available seats getting held by processing or pending orders.

Kind regards,
Sara

[Jennifer]

Hi Sara,

If you are generating attendee records when the order is processing, then this will reduce the stock – however, I do not believe that changing this setting to instead generate the attendee record when the order is complete will affect your Mailchimp settings. I am not sure how you have this set up, but the attendee record is separate from the user account. I would recommend giving this a try with a test order on your staging site and see if things are being generated the way that you need – the user is added to your Mailchimp list but not to the attendee records by putting the order into “Processing”.

It sounds like since this one attendee record was generated from the user who didn’t complete the purchase, plus the 5 refunds that you processed, the capacity that you set (55) was reached, which is why the event was being reported as sold out. However, you should be able to adjust the stock manually from here to make the spots for the refunds that you processed available again. Can you confirm that this is the case?

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Sarah]

Hi Jennifer,

I do not believe that adjusting the stock manually should be the answer. I think that if there is a refund the stock should increase by one.

I have since changed the Event > Settings to only generate a record once the order status is complete, send an email to customer once the order status is complete, and I have maintained the setting to only reduce stock once order has completed. That has helped not add customers to the attendee list and occupy (hold) a seat for those that have not fully completed the purchase.

Also, just to help the community. I figured out that when a customer adds it to their cart and cancels or a payment is pending a record is created in Woocommerce > Orders with the above settings a seat is not held in the attendee list until complete but Mailchimp and Facebook Woocommerce Extensions will work fine because they only look at Woocommerce > Orders list not the Event Attendee list.

However, I think there is a real issue here because I purchased the Order Export CVS from Woocommerce to export all of my orders by product and date. I did a VLookup comparing both the Event Attendee List and the Woocommerce Orders. There were 25 orders in Woocommerce Orders that were not appear in the respective Event Attendee list. When I looked up each order (Woocommerce > Order > Order #) There was a line linking to the correct event. So I know the order was appropriately associated to the right product associated to the correct event. The 25 missing attendees seemed to be around the same time 7/14/18 to 7/22/18 and also one week in April.

How do I manually add these orders to the event attendee list? So I can print a list for for my client, also so they can get a ticket with a QRC. I’m a little concerned because I have additional required questions when a customer registers for a conference and assume they were not answered because they are not associated with an event, where or would that information possibly be stored?

Thanks for your help.

[Jennifer]

Hi Sarah,

I’m glad that changing the record generation settings appears to have solved the issue with records being generated for incomplete orders!

Additional information (from the custom fields that you created on your tickets) can be seen on the Attendees page. From there, you can click the “View details” link to see the additional fields and customer responses. You can also export the attendees list from that page to get a CSV that includes the responses.

Other than creating a new order, there really isn’t a way to manually add attendees…When you go to the Attendees page (which you can access from the ticket section on the event edit page – see screenshot) for the event that the order is linked to, are you able to find the email address associated with the order? Were these orders for multiple tickets (and if so, are all of the attendee records for that order missing)?

[Sarah]

Hi Jennifer,

I have tickets limited to 1 ticket per order. By code in my function.php that was given to me by MT Event Support so absolutely no multiple tickets per order. I can find customers by email in the order but 25 of the orders are not in the attendee list. So I would like to add them so I can give them a QRC ticket.

Kind regards,
Sara

[Jennifer]

Hi Sara,

Have all of these orders been marked “Completed”? If you search for the email address from the WooCommerce order in the attendee list for the associated event, you are not able to find that attendee there, is that correct? Is it possible that the attendees for these orders were deleted or moved to another event?

Just to double check, I would still recommend verifying that one order is not listed multiple times in the attendee list (meaning that multiple tickets were purchased in one order). If you look at the number of tickets sold at the top of the attendee page, does this match the number of attendees you have minus any that were deleted/moved?

The only way to add manually create attendees is to create a new order…otherwise, I’m afraid the records would need to be created manually in the database. I can check with one of our developers on doing this if needed, but since I am not able to recreate this issue locally and haven’t seen any other similar reports of missing attendees, I think that there is likely an issue locally causing a discrepancy.

[Sarah]

Hi Jennifer,

All of the orders have been marked as completed and have not been moved. I’m not sure if you are familiar with a vlookup but it literally checks line for line each order for matches. I have also spot checked by hand a few events as well. There is no way the orders have been moved because they appear in the order list but not in the attendee list.

I don’t want to recreate the order because I’m trying to maintain the records in the actual users My account so they can revisit and view their past orders.

I am interested in hearing what your developer would say about adding the records to the attendee table. Also because you can’t recreate the issue I can give admin access to my test site if that helps?

[Jennifer]

Hi Sara,

Thanks for verifying that – I am checking with the team on this, and I’ll let you know what I find out!

[Albert]

Hi Jennifer

1. I am experiencing the same issue of ticket sales and attendee count not synchronising.
If I delete an attendee the Deleted Attendees number is incremented correctly, but Available Tickets is not increased. If I refund the order the attendees is decreased on the Events page but ticket availability is still not increased.
I agree with Sarah on “I do not believe that adjusting the stock manually should be the answer. I think that if there is a refund the stock should increase by one.” and that the attendee list should also be updated to reflect a correct list as it is leading to frustrating mistakes and time wasted to check everything.
In our use case we give courses that need to be certified and administration quality systems need to be verified. The procedures to refund, manually correct attendee records and manually correct available ticket correctness does not provide that quality assurance.
It would be very much appreciated if this workflow could be automated.
2. We experience that in some PayPal transactions 2 tickets are issued for 1 purchase. This will create 2 attendee entries for the same person, a decrease of 2 in stock and the purchaser receive a order with two tickets on it. This cause the same issue as above with manual attendee record correction.This issue might be related to another thread where it was reported that if a purchaser purchase one ticket but change the number to 2 in PayPal, it might not be reflected correctly back in Ticket Pro. Please see attached files for the PayPal Order and Order Notes.

[Albert]

Here is the Order Notes

[Jennifer]

Hi Albert,

I’m sorry that you’re running into issues with the attendee count. Regarding changing the way the stock adjusts automatically, I definitely understand where you’re coming from here. Would you be able to post this as a feature request over in our Feature Ideas Forum? This is what we use to gauge user interest in new features and help guide future development efforts.

For the second issue with duplicate attendees, can you please open up a new thread so that we can assist you with this? Please make sure to share your full system info with us.

Sara, could you send us a database dump along with some of the events and order numbers where attendees are missing so that we can look more closely at this?

[Albert]

Hi Jennifer

I do not agree that correct attendee counting and the correct available tickets for a venue is a new feature. This is a bug that need to be fixed asap and not be put on a development request as it is already a feature of the program that does not reflect correct outputs.

Please address this in such a matter as we need a program reflecting correct figures.

[Sarah]

This reply is private.

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