Refunding Tickets with WooCommerce

[Elizabeth]

An attendee wanted to cancel their order. We sell our tickets through Event Tickets Plus and WooCommerce. I refunded their order through WooCommerce, but the tickets were still listed as sold in Event Tickets Plus. I did finally find in your documentation that you have to manually go in and add an extra ticket if you want to resell a refunded ticket (this is horribly inconvenient and counter-intuitive, btw, and it messes with our sales numbers because then it shows that we sold more tickets than we actually did because it still counts the refunded sale as a sold ticket, which is really bad). However, what’s even more annoying is that when you go and view the Attendee list, the refunded ticket holder is still listed as an attendee for the event. This means that someone could buy a ticket, get a refund, and then still show up at the event and get in because your system still lists them as an attendee for the event. Please tell me this is a bug and not how you intend for the software to work?

[Barry]

Hi Elizabeth,

I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced difficulties.

I refunded their order through WooCommerce, but the tickets were still listed as sold in Event Tickets Plus

I can understand why this might be confusing, but it is actually intentional.

A refund can happen for many different reasons and does not always mean that stock has been ‘released’. For instance, a refund may be issued for customer service reasons/as a goodwill gesture, with the customer retaining the tickets and continuing to attend the event with the management’s blessing.

To accommodate such cases we don’t automatically restock the event or even remove the tickets from the attendee screen – though we do clearly annotate them as having been refunded. If however you select those attendees and delete them you should find that the event is indeed “re-stocked”.

This means that someone could buy a ticket, get a refund, and then still show up at the event and get in because your system still lists them as an attendee for the event.

The hope is that staff performing check-in will either see that the ticket has been refunded (and will have been equipped by management with the knowledge necessary to determine if that means the ticket is consequently invalid or not, depending on the situation) or that the attendee will have been deleted from the list.

There are pros and cons to both approaches, but actually retaining the attendee on the list – clearly marked as refunded – may well help prevent confusion (vs having a customer arrive with what appears to be a valid ticket, yet check-in staff have no record of it).

…because it still counts the refunded sale as a sold ticket

True, though again this is intentional: the fact an order was refunded – or perhaps even cancelled – does not mean the sale did not take place.

Once a decision has been taken to re-stock the ticket inventory (or not), the critical information in terms of how many tickets are remaining for sale remains present on the attendee screen and should be accurate.

Please tell me this is a bug and not how you intend for the software to work?

I’m afraid to say that much of what you have asked about actually is intentional, though I’m sorry to hear it has led to a poor experience in your case.

How we handle order statuses and ticket inventory is something we’ve been refining through successive releases and we’ll continue to do so: it’s important to bear in mind however that we need to meet the needs of many different businesses (not all of whom have the same processes or who would like automatic re-stocking to happen the moment a refund is issued).

With all that said and having explained why a number of things work the way they do … are there specific changes you would like to see to make the experience a better one for you and your team?

[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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