Using Event Tickets Pro at Point of sale

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  • #1067122
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Hi,
    We are building a site for a client of ours who gets about 500,000 visitors a year. 70% of the visitors come through the door without booking, we want to use the same database to record POS sales as well as online bookings, is there a way we can use ETP at the door to allow staff to quickly sell tickets without having to record customer data?

    Thanks,
    Dave

    #1067371
    Brook
    Participant

    Howdy Dave,

    I would love to help you with this.

    As I understand it you want a terminal setup at the door for walkins to purchase tickets quickly. Will an employee be using the terminal, or will customers be directly using it? Are you planning on having them enter CC details into the site, or using a POS terminal you have there?

    Cheers!

    – Brook

    #1067421
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Hey Brook,
    Thanks for coming back to me.
    The POS terminal at the door will be managed by staff and they will accept cash or CC payments using the existing CC machine at the door.

    We would like to be able to quickly record and create tickets for people who pay at the door using the same database as the online bookings.

    Thanks,
    Dave

    #1067896
    Brook
    Participant

    Thank you for clarifying Dave. You could definitely do this. WooCommerce essentially has a pay at the door payment gateway. And there is nothing stopping your employee from purchasing a ticket on behalf of someone standing there. Here are the steps they would go through for every ticket:

    1. Open event URL. Select amount, click Add to Cart.
    2. Click Proceed to Checkout. (If you are interested in making this as fast as possible, and know PHP or can hire someone who does, this step can be skipped by your employees.)
    3. Input the purchasers info, such as name and address. Fields can be made optional at your discretion. Select Cash on Delivery as payment option. Click “Place Order”.
    4. Visit the backend order’s URL, click approve order. (This step is optional, you can set orders for tickets to auto approve. Many people do this, but still prefer manually approving. Or, with a PHP dev you could make it autoapprove only for employees.)

    Each step will take about 2s for the page to load. Step 3 will take the longest, as the employee will need to type in the purchasers name and any other details you want on record.

    The tickets themselves will be emailed to the purchaser’s email address. If you are using a barcode scanner at the entrance and the customer has a smartphone, this is perfect. They can walk up with their email open, you scan the screen of their phone and check them in. If you’re not using the scanner, or the customer doesn’t have a phone on them, you might input a shared employee inbox as the purchasers address. The ticket will be emailed to this inbox and you can print it out. Or, to make this process even faster and truly seamless you could setup a printer with an email address. Many modern wireless printers have this capability. If you type in the printers email address as the purchaser email, the printer will automatically print out the tickets as soon as it gets the email. Thus, it will nearly instantly print the ticket once you hit step 4 of the above.

    Or, depending on your venue is setup you might not even need to check the user in after purchase. If there is no lobby area, and they go direct from purchasing a ticket to being inside the venue, then you might not even need to hand the user a ticket.

    Best case scenario you could trim this down to a ~30 second process. You will need printer with an email address, a fast web server, and a few hours of dev time from a PHP dev.

    Does that clarify everything? Does it sound like it would work?

    Cheers!

    – Brook

    #1068001
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Thanks for all the info Brook, much appreciated. we’ll look into this.

    Dave

    #1069251
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Hi Brook, hope the weekend was fun.
    Our client is looking at something along the lines of what you guys offer out of the box but there may be some customisation required to suit their needs. We don’t want to hack your plugin ourselves as it may turn out to be counter productive both in the short and long term. Is it an option for us to work with you on this as a Custom Enterprise Solution if we need to? Obviously we need to firm up the scope with the client before we ask you for costs but do you have a minimum budget for this type of thing before you take it on?

    Thanks,
    Dave

    #1069256
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    One question:
    I see from previous posts in the forum that you do not support recurring events ? This would be a problem for us if this is the case as we need to be able to sell tickets for different visiting times everyday of the year, So I would have thought recurring events would be the way to do it. Is there another way?

    We just want to make sure your system can handle recurrence over multiple times on the same day, as well as multiple days. I.e., can we sell admission every half hour 7 days a week?

    Thanks,
    Dave

    #1069261
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Hi yet again Brook, sorry for all the messages this is the last one before I hear back from you. I wanetd to share a simple list of features we need might help you work out of you guys can provide this for us.

    – Ability to sell tickets with daily, weekly, monthly recurrence.
    – Ability to associate sales with a specific date and time of recurring event.
    – Ability to sell tickets for once-off events.
    – Ability to manage capacities and adjust once sales are in progress.
    – Capacities should update in real time.
    – Ability to export contact lists of tickets sold.
    – Real-time information on tickets purchased.
    – Ability to validate tickets.

    Hope that helps.
    Thanks,
    Dave

    #1070537
    Brook
    Participant

    Howdy Dave,

    Thanks for getting back. I was on a short vacation, so please pardon the belated response.

    You’ve done a lot of good research since we last talked. I’ll answer those one by one.

    – Ability to sell tickets with daily, weekly, monthly recurrence.

    That’s a builtin capability.

    – Ability to associate sales with a specific date and time of recurring event.

    This is not yet possible. We are currently working to add this feature to the calendar. It will likely be ready with version 4.2 of our plugins.

    – Ability to sell tickets for once-off events.

    Builtin capability.

    – Ability to manage capacities and adjust once sales are in progress.

    If I understand what you’re asking that’s a builtin capability. Our plugin handles “stock” counts for tickets. You can have multiple types of tickets, like regular seats, box seats, etc. Each will have it’s own # available, or stock. Each time a user buys a ticket 1 will be removed from the available stock. You can adjust that stock count yourself as well to increase/decrease it at any point.

    – Capacities should update in real time.

    Everything happens in real time.

    – Ability to export contact lists of tickets sold.

    Right now our plugin collects the name/email of the purchaser. These can easily be exported as a CSV, but might not be quite what you’re looking for. We are working on adding customizable data collection for tickets, so that you can collect more than just the name and email and do so for each attendee. This feature will likely be released in our next release (version 4.1). As you’ve probably noted we are focused right now on adding new features to the tickets framework.

    – Real-time information on tickets purchased.

    Builtin feature.

    – Ability to validate tickets.

    By this do you mean the ability to check people in at the door and make sure they have a valid ticket? If so then this is a builtin feature.

    I see from previous posts in the forum that you do not support recurring events ? This would be a problem for us if this is the case as we need to be able to sell tickets for different visiting times everyday of the year, So I would have thought recurring events would be the way to do it. Is there another way?

    That is true, we do not yet support recurring events. This feature is tentatively slotted for version 4.2 of our plugins. You can currently work around this by splitting an event from the recurring series and adding tickets to it, but this definitely involves some manual labor for each occurrence.

    We just want to make sure your system can handle recurrence over multiple times on the same day, as well as multiple days. I.e., can we sell admission every half hour 7 days a week?

    Like the above a workaround is available – splitting each time slot up into its own series of events. If you have an event that occurs every Friday at 6pm and 9pm, create two series. One for 6, the other for 9.

    Our client is looking at something along the lines of what you guys offer out of the box but there may be some customisation required to suit their needs. We don’t want to hack your plugin ourselves as it may turn out to be counter productive both in the short and long term. Is it an option for us to work with you on this as a Custom Enterprise Solution if we need to? Obviously we need to firm up the scope with the client before we ask you for costs but do you have a minimum budget for this type of thing before you take it on?

    We’d love to work with you if possible. We have a large variety of freelancers very familiar with our plugin’s API that tend to take on “smaller” projects: List of freelance customizers. We have occasionally taken on very large projects ourselves, the sort that require a team of developers, graphics designer(s), and a number of months of dev to complete. It really depends on the magnitude of your project. If you would like to pursue this further please reach out to us privately: http://tri.be/contact/.

    Does that answer all of your questions?

    Cheers!

    – Brook

    #1071221
    Dave Jackson
    Guest

    Great, thanks Brook, that really helps us make a decision.

    Dave

    #1071700
    Brook
    Participant

    You’re very welcome Dave. I wish I had all good news for you, but the main thing I wanted to be was forthright.

    Our plugins were designed for smaller venues, and have thrived providing much of the features folks needed there. But, for larger ones, and it sounds like yours is, the plugins certainly have some weak points. One of the main things our strategist wants is focusing on in 2016 is making the plugins scale better. Hence why we have so many features on our near term roadmap that you are looking for.

    If you are interested in working with us to some extent or another please do reach out. We are always keen to work with larger venues and help meet their needs. ( http://tri.be/contact/ )

    Cheers!

    – Brook

    #1082465
    Support Droid
    Keymaster

    This topic has not been active for quite some time and will now be closed.

    If you still need assistance please simply open a new topic (linking to this one if necessary)
    and one of the team will be only too happy to help.

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