Selling tickets at an event

[Michael]

Hi All,

I’m putting together a site for a theatre and they want to be able to sell tickets at the event as well as online.
What is the best way to do this?

Right now I can imagine two scenarios:

a) accept payment physically via the usual method (cash, credit card, etc) using cash register then enter the purchases into woo commerce afterwards.

b) create the tickets right there while the customer is waiting (ie, accept cash or process the card through the website while they wait).

Is there another / better method to do this?

Thanks!

[Cliff]

Hi Michael. Thanks for your question.

Event Tickets Plus is our paid add-on plugin that upgrades the functionality of our free Event Tickets plugin.

Event Tickets Plus enables you to sell tickets via one of our supported eCommerce platforms. The free plugin only enables free RSVP-type tickets.

You can view our roundup/comparison of all the eCommerce plugins ET+ supports.

Our plugin uses your eCommerce plugin of choice, but your eCommerce plugin isn’t displayed for shopping pages. Please reference our Making Tickets KB article (screenshots are from an install using WooCommerce) for an idea how to create tickets for an event.

Site visitors would purchase tickets from each event’s single page/view (e.g. example.com/events/rogers-day-at-the-zoo/) — if there is an RSVP to submit or ticket to purchase.

The order confirmation email will include a QR code that can be scanned to “check in” someone at the door at the time of the event. You can read more at Tickets: Managing your orders and attendees.

The other factor is that there’s a limited quantity of each ticket. If you create a ticket for a specific event, you also have to specify the quantity available. If you make 1 available and then sell it right away in-person (them on their phone or your computer in front of you), then quantity available will be zero, which makes it look sold out. So if you have a 100 seat auditorium, I’d suggest just creating the ticket with 100 quantity available from the start and then let people buy them however they want — online from their home or in-person in front of you.

I hope this info helps. Please let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[Michael]

Hi Cliff, thanks for your reply.

I have Tickets Plus enabled on my site, but I was wondering more specifically about how people setup to sell tickets at the show.

We will of course sell the bulk online before the show, but when people come to the theatre on the day of the show I’m wondering if there is a specific method or interface for creating tickets for them? Or would you suggest accepting purchase outside of the Woo Commerce system then entering those sales in afterwards?

For example, say we sold 40 tickets online and we have 10 left to sell at the door which we sell by cash, how do I enter these sales into the system afterwards? As we’d like to keep accurate records of our sales all inside of Woo Commerce.

Thanks very much!

[Cliff]

Personally, I’d always use the website, even if you’re the one completing it for them as they walk-in and you just ask for their name and email address and submit the checkout form for them. Then you can enable Check/Cash payment as a valid checkout payment method in WooCommerce and mark the order Paid immediately in wp-admin.

To protect against internet buyers (non-in-person buyers) choosing the check/cash payment at checkout, you might be able to do something programmatically to enable that payment method only for logged-in administrators or you could just use a specific coupon code for 100% off and you’d know that all checkouts with that coupon code were paid cash instead of charged online, but that would throw off your WooCommerce reporting.

I’ll let you decide how best to proceed for your use case, but if you need some coding help, you may want to ask your developer or reference our documentation and list of known customizers.

[Michael]

Just pointing out that I found (haven’t tested yet) a WooCommerce Point of Sale (POS) plugin that accepts card readers and has pretty much a cash register screen. I’m going to test this as it looks like exactly what is needed for selling tickets in a box office, as filling in the payment page on WooCommerce is just going to take too long for a line of customers waiting in the noisy lobby.

[Cliff]

Thanks for sharing your plans. We don’t have any integration with that or any other POS plugin and I’d guess that plugin will make purchases just fine from WooCommerce. However, the inventory and sales reports from Event Tickets Plus will most likely be off because it was purchased directly via WooCommerce instead of via Event Tickets Plus + WooCommerce.

If you do try it, we’d love to hear back how it works, but I needed to let you know that we cannot provide support for it at this time.

I would suggest that you find/add your suggestion (an in-person, at-the-door, POS way to sell tickets) at our plugins’ UserVoice page.

This allows others who are interested in that feature to easily voice their support. We frequently review suggestions there to find out which ones are popular, then we implement as many of them as we can.

Once you post it or find an existing one to vote for, feel free to link to it from here in case anyone comes across this forum thread in the future.

[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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