WooTickets selling backorders of tickets when they're out of stock.

[James Kendall]

Hello all,
I’ve got a bit of a sudden problem here. I opened up online sales of tickets using WooTIckets today for the first time and despite me stating how many stock of each ticket is available some tickets have sold more that I have stock of. This is very frustrating and embarrassing as I will have to contact buyers and disappoint them. How has this happened?
I did some research and saw that I needed to look at Product Inventory and make sure “allow backorder” wasn’t enabled, which it wasn’t.
Currently some tickets are showing stock of -1, some are showing -4 which is alarming.
Can anyone help?
I am using the Genesis theme with Event Calendar PRO, WooTIckets and WooCommerce.

Thanks, James

[Geoff]

Hi James,

So sorry for the trouble here! That is definitely not a good thing and sorry for putting you in such a bad position with customers.

This is really puzzling. I tried testing this:

• Checked to make sure I was using the latest versions of The Events Calendar, WooCommerce and WooCommerce Tickets
• Created a new event
• Added a ticket for that event and gave it a quantity of 1
• Viewed the event on the front end of the site
• Selected one ticket in the quantity field and successfully added the ticket to the cart
• Removed the ticket from my cart to replenish the stock
• Tried selecting 2 tickets, but got an error message when clicking the “Add to Cart” button (screenshot)
• Purchased a single ticket
• Went back to the event and tried to purchase another ticket but was given a message that the tickets are out of stock (screenshot)

In other words, I was unable to recreate the issue on my end. I’m working with another member of our team to test this specifically on Genesis but, in the meantime, are you able to test with these same steps? Or is there a different method I should be using to test? Please let me know and we can dig deeper from there.

Thanks!
Geoff

[James Kendall]

Hi Geoff,
Thanks for looking into this – it is puzzling.
I’ve now had to issue over £100 of refunded tickets and send various apologies out to customers – not a fun experience.
I’ll create a test event and ticket and see if i can create the same issue again.
What I’ve been doing in the meantime to ensure that the problem doesn’t happen again is that when I have sold out of a ticet i have then deleted the product from the event page. problem is then it is deleted from the back end and I can’t view reports on the product – which is quite frustrating.
I’ll test this again tomorrow and let you know what the result was.
Let me know if you find anything.
James

[Geoff]

Hey James,

Quick question: are you using PayPal for your WooCommerce payments?

The reason I ask is that we have seen reports come in where neither method properly decreases the ticket quantity in the inventory. I found this thread as an example, as well as this one. In short, it happens when Paypal is used to purchase tickets and runs into an error that does not get returned to WooCommerce. So, the transaction status from from Pending to Processing but PayPal never provides the confirming that the order is complete or if it hit an error preventing the transaction from happening.

You can check out my colleague Brian’s answer to this. Unfortunately, this seems to be on the WooCommerce side of things and something that we’ve tried looking into and determined that we were unable to resolve it on our end.

So sorry for the trouble! Does this at least help clarify what’s happening?

Geoff

[Support Droid]

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