refunds and ticket count

[Len]

Hello. This build on the discussion here: https://tri.be/support/forums/topic/follow-up-to-thread-canceling-tickets-an-stock-count/

Is there any way at all to remove a cancelled/refunded ticket from WooTickets?
I host events that accommodate exactly 20 people. Let’s say 5 tix have been sold; the inventory is now 15 tix available, and the attendee list indicates 5 of 20 sold.
One person cancels and is refunded. WooCommerce updates the inventory so that 16 are now available for sale, but WooTicket continues to report that 5 of 20 have been sold. If I increase the inventory manually, this makes WooTIckets show that 5 of 21 have been sold, which is very confusing.
How can I get WooTickets to accurately reflect the new/real status, ie. that 4 of the 20 tix are sold, so I can have a clear picture of how many spots people are coming/how many places remain? This is especially important if we want to display the number of tickets sold/available to site visitors.
Thanks,
LEN

[Len]

Another related issue has emerged: occasionally I will get a request for a ticket from someone who is unable to purchase it online. This isn’t much of an issue per se – I can just go into WooCommerce>Orders and create an order for them. However, I notice that when I do this, WooTIckets does not process the inventory adjustment properly; ie. if 5 out of 20 tickets are sold, and I sell one manually via the backend, the event now reports 6 of 21 sold. Again adding confusion to both event mgmt as well as our attempt to display the number of tickets remaining for sale. Is there something specific/different I need to be doing to process an order this way?
Thanks,
LEN

[luvio]

It would be great to have a page to manage manually (add / remove) sold tickets (not orders). Is there a way to code it using an API ?

Cheers

[Barry]

Hi LEN,

One person cancels and is refunded. WooCommerce updates the inventory so that 16 are now available for sale, but WooTicket continues to report that 5 of 20 have been sold.

I’m not sure we are experiencing the same thing here.

• I have 100 tickets for an event
• Someone orders 10 of them
• There are now 90 units (tickets) available for sale
• That order is initially accepted but then cancelled and ultimately refunded
• WooCommerce does not add that stock back automatically, so the available inventory remains 90 units
• WooCommerce Tickets continues to show that 10 out of 100 were sold, which is true (10 were indeed sold), but also highlights that those 10 were refunded in the attendee list

Is it possible you have a customization or extension which causes the stock to be added back automatically? Our experience and understanding to date is that with WooCommerce, manual intervention in an order requires manual stock control.

@luvio: great idea – we welcome any and all feature requests over on our UserVoice page. I’m sure you could indeed do this programmatically but it is unfortunately beyond the scope of support we can offer to guide you through this one: if you have further questions, please do post them in a new thread of your own. Thanks!

[Len]

My mistake – WooCommerce does NOT automatically return the ticket to inventory if an order is refunded or cancelled. e.g. if 5/20 are sold, and one is cancelled or refunded, the inventory remains at 15, and still shows as 5/20, instead of 4/20. If I try to manually put the refunded ticket back into inventory, it shows as 5/21. There seems to be no existing way to fix/change/override this. This is what I am trying to figure out.

[Len]

And similarly, if 5/20 are sold, and I put 1 order manually through the back end (eg. a comp or non-online sale), although the inventory does reduce by 1, WooTickets displays available/sold tickets as 6/21 (instead of the correct, 6/20), with no way to fix/override this.

[Len]

I’m sorry, I’m just double checking all this. Apparently the inventory is NOT reduced by 1 if I process an order manually*. 5/20 becomes 6/21. If I then go in an manually reduce the product inventory by one, it becomes 6/20. This effectively deals with this situation, albeit in a two-step fashion, but the original issues of cancelled/refunded tickets remain.

*(Is this not a bit odd? I cannot see any setting/field in the order screen that would seem to change this).

[Barry]

So this all sounds like expected behaviour and, ultimately, you are describing facets of how WooCommerce handles manual orders, refunds and inventory rather than a set of behaviours that are specific to WooCommerce Tickets.

I definitely appreciate that, depending on your viewpoint, this may not be ideal and even a little odd – but our own take is that it is not our responsibility to interfere with the operation of the underlying ecommerce engine (WooCommerce in this case, of course) and that doing so would simply be the wrong course of action. Plus, it would be potentially confusing to boot, especially if you are retailing other merchandise besides tickets.

Remember that a refund does not necessarily mean the stock has been returned/that a person will not be attending. Also, when manually creating orders, remember that you can specify actions such as incrementing or decrementing stock for the line items you add – so that might save you a step or two in this particular scenario.

Beyond that, you would really need to approach WooThemes’ own support channels for further assistance in terms of modifying WooCommerce’s behaviour or learning more about how it works.

Does that help at all/clarify things?

[Len]

Unfortunately not. While I think I’ve figured out how to process manual orders properly, I am still stuck with the original problem, that of being unable to remove refunded or cancelled tickets. This is specific to the number of sold/available tickets that WooTickets displays.

If a ticket is cancelled or refunded, then I need some way to be able to re-introduce it into inventory to be sold, and remove it from the count of sold tickets; if I’ve sold 5/20 and refund/cancel one, and then return it to inventory (manually or otherwise), then I need WooTickets to tell me that 4/20 are sold, not 5/21 (which is terribly confusing, and that’s with just a single refund or cancellation!).

As events get close to sold out, it becomes extremely important to have a clear idea of exactly how many attendees there are/spots remain, especially if I hope to display this on the site. Seeing numbers like 18/26 for an event that only has 20 tickets available is a disaster waiting to happen. How many spots are left? For small events where every ticket counts and over-selling is a BIG problem, this is a really important issue.

[Barry]

I can definitely see your viewpoint here.

Further changes along these lines aren’t something we would consider lightly – though we will certainly consider them – and I’d encourage you to post a feature request (or add your support/comments to any suitable existing request that might already be logged). On our end, we would be particularly interested in your thoughts relating to the following:

• Do you simply need a different counting system – ie, the number of tickets sold less tickets cancelled/refunded? Would separate totals for the number cancelled and number refunded suffice?
• Do you envision needing to differentiate between refunds and cancellations that result in inventory being freed versus some that don’t (such as if a refund is given as a goodwill gesture or has some other customer service motive, but doesn’t mean they will not be attending)? How would you envision making this distinction?
• If we allow deletion of entries in the attendee list, do you foresee confusion for staff members checking guests in? If for instance they attend with a printed copy of the ticket that was issued to them, but there is no trace of it on the system. What means would you have of verifying if there had been a system error or if it had indeed been deleted? The current system does at least allow the ticket number to be identified and indicates that a cancellation/refund/some other action took place

There is a lot to consider here and I’d close by saying we A) have to do what is best in the widest interests of the community and B) our ticketing solutions are intended to be simple, robust ticketing solutions – not comprehensive event management solutions. So we’re open to building in new features and functionality, but any such requests would need to be in line with those goals. Complexity also means increased development and maintenance costs and we do also have to bear that in mind when setting the price of our plugins.

In the short term though there is not a huge amount I can offer up, unfortunately, so I’ll go ahead and close this thread – but we do look forward to seeing your request on UserVoice.

Thanks again – your support and your feedback is much appreciated.

[Author]

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