Good afternoon Lisa and welcome to the Events Calendar Support forum!
Thank you for reaching out to us.
We are sorry to hear about the tickets being confirmed before the purchase. Yikes!
I would love to help you with this topic.
Full disclosure, that is probably because of the “Try to set to complete” setting found in Events -> Settings -> Tickets.
We noticed that this setting had unintentional disastrous results for some of our customers.
We apologize for any inconvenience this might have created.
The good news is that if you upgrade to Event Tickets Plus 4.4.2, we completely redesigned this feature and it should put an end to this issue for you.
Let me know how that goes.
Best regards,
Geoff B.