Over sold tickets to an event

[haboredman]

Hi, We have been using Events Calendar Pro with WooCommerce Tickets and just this week we had 2 events that sold more tickets than we had allowed in the inventory. The settings for inventory are marked for “Do not allow backorders.” This product/ticket was created the same as all the rest but for some reason it sold 2 tickets over our inventory.
Do you have any suggestions as to what went wrong? We just don’t want this to happen in the future. Thanks!

[Geoff]

Hello haboredman,

Shoot, sorry about that! That’s definitely not good and I’m sorry for any frustration that overselling created.

By default, visitors are not able to select a quantity greater than the stock number that is available for a specific ticket. For example, if there is one ticket in stock, the ticket form will prevent the quantity from being any greater than one. Here’s a screenshot of how the looks on the front end.

Is it possible you the combined stock of all tickets for that event was greater than the available inventory? Tickets do not share a global stock (though it’s something we want to do), so I wonder if that’s where the discrepancy occurred. Let me know if that is possibly what happened.

Cheers!
Geoff

[haboredman]

I don’t believe that is the case since we only have one ticket for each event and the stock was set at 28, but 30 tickets were sold.
Very curious…

[Geoff]

Definitely very curious!

So, just to confirm: are you able to go to the editing screen for that particular event and look at the WooCommerce section where the tickets were created? Does it say 30 of 38 tickets were sold, or something else (screenshot).

Geoff

[haboredman]

Yes, the ticket inventory is in red and says -2 , and under the event guest list is says 30 tickets sold out of 28.

[Geoff]

Oh wow! I’ve never seen that happen (and can’t seem to make it happen myself). Will you please send me a screenshot of that? I’d love to ticket that so we can look into that more closely.

Geoff

[haboredman]

This reply is private.

[Geoff]

OK, I’ve been digging into this a little more. Thanks so much for the screenshots–they really helped. 🙂

As it turns out, it would technically be possible for two people to be on the same page at the same time and each make a request for tickets that is greater than the number of actual tickets available. Imagine if there is one ticket left, but two people are on the event page–each page thinking there is one ticket left–then both people make a purchase.

This is a classic ecommerce conundrum because you don’t want to prevent one customer from purchasing over the other in case the first one winds up not making the purchase. Ultimately, it would need to be caught at the checkout page rather than the event page itself, which is something that the ticketing plugin cannot do on its own–rather it would be a general ecommerce situation that WooCommerce (or any ecommerce platform) would need to address.

I do think that is what’s happening here. Do you think it could something else, or does something else sound more plausible based on what you’ve seen?

Thanks!
Geoff

[haboredman]

This reply is private.

[Geoff]

Good question. I’ve been searching around the WooCommerce forums for a bit and have come up empty as far documentation for how to prevent that sort of situation from happening. I did see this thread on the public forums that is similar, but not totally the same issue. I think it would be worth posting a new thread in the WooCommerce forums to see how other may have dealt with similar situations. A lot of people use WooCommerce and I’d be surprised if someone doesn’t have something to offer there.

I’ll go ahead and close this thread since I’m afraid we’ve reached a point where this is better answered by WooCommerce instead of WooCommerce Tickets, but do please feel free to start another thread here if any other questions pop up and we’d be happy to help as best we can. 🙂

Thanks so much again for reaching out!

Geoff

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