Selling tickets offline

[Ian]

Hiya,

We are planning to purchase Events CalendarPro to manage bookings on a new website we are building. Our client wants to be able to manually sell tickets i.e. on behalf of a customer rather than the user directly interfacing with the website. Does teh plugin support this or would it be a question for Woo Commerce?

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Ian and welcome to the Events Calendar forum!

Thank you for your interest in our products.
We’ll be glad to answer your questions.

We are planning to purchase Events CalendarPro to manage bookings on a new website we are building.

Although the Events Calendar Pro is a great premium add-on with awesome features, to manage bookings you will be better off with Event Tickets Plus: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/wordpress-event-tickets-plus/

Our client wants to be able to manually sell tickets i.e. on behalf of a customer rather than the user directly interfacing with the website.

There are a couple of ways to achieve this. But the important part is that this is totally feasible.

Here are a couple of ideas to ponder:

1. You could require a user to be logged-in to see and purchase ticket while blocking front-end user creation.

   Once that is done, you can simply create users as you go along and use a plugin such as https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-switching/

2. You could set everything up normally but control the WooCommerce payment option assigned to tickets (e.g.: offline credit card, cash on delivery, etc..) and make sure the order is placed to “pending” once completed on the front-end.

   That way, only the admin or shop manager is able to manually to complete orders

3. You could insert simple text about costs or even a form to gather customer info in the event description.

   Once that is done, create tickets associated to a different post type (e.g.: normal blog posts). This is possible since tickets can be associated to any post type (page, post, custom post type).

   Give those posts the same name as the event for simplicity’s sake and set these posts to password protected.

   When the orders come in, go through the process of a customer purchasing the ticket in the other post type.

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Ian]

Thank you for such a thorough response, please can I clarify the requirement in case this impacts your suggestions:

I plan to use the plug-in to sell tickets to events and I am hoping that I can use the same functionality to allow booking of seats for afternoon tea in a cafe. I am pretty sure the principal of selling a finite number ‘places’ on a specific date can be handled in a similar way to an event?

I need to enable users to purchase tickets on the website in a normal eCommerce situation and also enable tickets to be sold manually at point of sale. The main requirement is that the overall stock control is accurate whether the ticket is sold over the counter or online.

Does this impact on the advice you have given me? Also do you think this plugin could be used for the offline sales? http://wcpos.com/pro/ it integrates with Woo but I don’t know if this would work in conjunction with your plugin?

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Ian,

Thank you for taking the time to write back.
I will gladly answer your follow-up questions.

I plan to use the plug-in to sell tickets to events and I am hoping that I can use the same functionality to allow booking of seats for afternoon tea in a cafe. I am pretty sure the principal of selling a finite number ‘places’ on a specific date can be handled in a similar way to an event?

Yes, you totally can have a limited amount of tickets for any event. You can even have several ticket types that share a global “stock” (total room capacity in this case).

I am not sure if this is a requirement, but you could even mimic selling certain seating arrangements: https://theeventscalendar.com/knowledgebase/ticketing-using-seating-chart/

I need to enable users to purchase tickets on the website in a normal eCommerce situation and also enable tickets to be sold manually at point of sale. The main requirement is that the overall stock control is accurate whether the ticket is sold over the counter or online.

Thank you for clarifying this. I was under the impression that you only wanted to sell offline.

You can totally handle that scenario too and yes it does change my recommendations.
In a nutshell:

1. You use Event Tickets Plus inside of events with the normal process
2. You will need to add another payment platform to WooCommerce that allows you to handle at the counter sales (these guys will still need a computer for that purpose), it could be “Cash on delivery” or a POS plugin of your choice (there is also https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-point-of-sale-pos/7869665).

WooCommerce POS plugins will work because our tickets are WooCommerce Simple virtual products. Itwill allow you to sell the WooCommerce tickets directly (without going through the front-end). In turn that will also impact the total number of spots available.

The only downside of making purchases from a POS interface is that some of the functionalities of the tickets will not be available that way (e.g.: additional attendee information gathering).

Let me know if that helps.

Have a great day!

Geoff B.

[Ian]

Thank you so much for your fast and detailed response. I will be purchasing the plug-in for use on this project – one of my colleagues may be in touch at a later date if we need any further help during implementation.

Thanks again for your helpful and professional assistance.

[Geoff B.]

Good evening Ian,

I am super stoked that this was useful to you.

You are welcome back in our support forums any time 🙂

For now, I am going to close this thread.

Have a great week!

Geoff B.

[Author]

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