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Brian Monarch
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February 18, 2015 at 9:30 pm
I am thinking of buying EE4. But before I do, I have a few questions. Hopefully you can answer them for me…
• I saw the “Stripe Payment Gateway add-on.” I was not planning on using Stripe as my merchant account or gateway. I want to use another company that my brother knows of. Lower rates. Can any credit card provider or merchant account be integrated into EE4? If so, why do you charge more for using Stripe by selling an add-on? Or do we have to use Stripe if we want to sell tickets using credit cards/paypal on EE4?
• Do customers see anything regarding “Event Espresso” during their experience?
• Can customers check out using their credit card or Paypal right on my website? Or does it send them to another site’s gateway for the actual payment part? I’ve seen some sites that make you fill out all the info and then the next thing you know you’re at a url like https://secure.authorize.net/gateway etc etc… to do the actual checkout. I’d like customers to be able to complete the entire transaction on my domain. Can that be done? If so, is this easy?
• I know I’ve heard before that EE3 has a lot more add-ons etc since it was around longer. Do you ever recommend buying EE3 instead of EE4 to some people? I’m basically using this to sell comedy tickets. What are the con’s EE3 in my situation? I don’t want to buy EE3 if it’s going to stop being supported and/or it’s just less powerful in a major way. Or if it doesn’t look as good.
• I saw you have a custom ticket add on. Is that necessary? Or will customers be able to print out tickets without that? They just won’t be custom?
Thanks!
Brian
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Dean
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February 19, 2015 at 4:18 am
Hi Brian,
Thanks for your interest in Event Espresso. If you would like to test drive EE4 for free, please head over to http://demoee.org
1) EE4 ships with some default gateways: Invoice, Bank Transfer, Cheque, Authorize.net AIM, PayPay standard, PayPal Pro and Mijireh.
Please note the first 3 are “offline” gateways and may require further processing on your end, and updating the attendees payment status manually.
This covers most peoples needs. We have released Stripe, and will release other gateways in the future, separately in case people require those gateways. You don’t have to buy it, nor use it especially if the default gateways cover your needs.
Other gateways can be implemented, but it would require either us to build it in at a cost or for a third party developer to do so.
2) Not from the front end, though you can promote EE from the front end if you wish to.
3) It depends on the gateway, some are onsite (meaning they never leave your site to pay) and some are offsite (e.g. PayPal standard). Is it easy? Yes it is so long as you have the right gateway merchant account, so for example of you haven’t signed up to Authorize.net’s correct account you can’t use AIM. Generally it’s just a case of adding in certain details to the settings (email, special API keys etc).
4) We still do occasionally recommend EE3 over EE4 but slowly that is changing. If you take a look at this article it highlights the differences between EE3 and EE4, so it might give you a better explanation: https://eventespresso.com/differences-ee4-ee3/
2 examples. Ticketing was not available in EE4, but recently it has become available. Multiple event purchases in one go is still only currently available for EE3, though EE4 does allow multiple ticket purchases within a single event.
EE3 support will continue for the foreseeable future: bug fixes, support etc. New features will for the most part stop for EE3.
Our intention is that one day everyone will move over to EE4, but we are still in a transition phase.
5) It depends on how you will deal with your attendees. Without the ticketing addon, the customer will still receive email notification of their purchase which they could use as a ticket, but it cannot be scanned. The Ticketing addon, allows you to create actual tickets that can be scanned with QR or Barcode scanners. They also generally look nicer than an email receipt.
I hope that helps but if you have further questions or need clarification please just ask. Also don’t forget to give the EE4 test drive a whirl.
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Brian Monarch
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February 19, 2015 at 9:54 pm
Thanks! I do have a few more questions.
1) Do you have a demo somewhere showing The EE4 Events Grid View template? It looks pretty cool, but I’d love to see it in action first to see if it meets all my needs.
2) I’m sure this one is dumb, but in all the demos I’ve seen so far, everything says “Register Now.” Buttons, the events grid screen shot etc… If I’m selling tickets, I’d rather it say “Buy Now.” That’s easy to change in all of these different places?
3) Is the plugin multi-site ready? Would it be possible to have clients sell tickets for their events on another site and get a service fee per ticket for each ticket they sell? I saw some other thing called Tickera and it said it had multisite support. Not even sure what that is, but thought it would be cool if I ever wanted to expand and let others sell tickets too.
4) If it doesn’t have multisite, which again, I’m not even 100% sure that is at this point… Could I let other people sell tickets on my site? Give them a login and have them create events etc… But they’d only be able to see their events/sales. Not mine or anyone else’s?
Thanks!
Brian
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Dean
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February 20, 2015 at 6:03 am
Hi,
No problem.
1) Well, this is another customers site (so please don’t make any test registrations) http://www.softlitestudios.com/workshops-grid/
2) It is changeable, you would need to use the translation system to do so (even if it’s English to English). See here: https://eventespresso.com/wiki/translating-event-espresso/
3) The plugin isn’t designed for multisite, though it *can* be used on multisite, though we only recommend using it on a site by site basis and not network wide.
The plugin is not really made for people to go out and create an Eventbrite competitor, though in theory and with some additional coding it should be possible. For example with are using EE4 on Event Smart.
4) Not with EE4 currently, though user management is on our to do list. EE3 can handle it using the Roles and Permissions plugins, though it still cannot take a commission from other peoples sales.
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Brian Monarch
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February 20, 2015 at 12:05 pm
Thanks! What did you mean by with using EE4 on Event Smart?
I saw you guys mention that the seating chart feature is probably a year or 2 away for EE4. Is the role management much closer? Is it actually being worked on? When it’s available, could I have a site for tickets that others sell tickets for their own events on and then I pay them and keep the service fees, assuming there are service charge abilities? Can you charge a service charge of any amount for tickets with EE4?
Thanks!
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Garth
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February 20, 2015 at 12:36 pm
Role management in Event Espresso 4 is included in Event Espresso 4.6+: https://eventespresso.com/2015/02/major-release-update-4-6-now-available/
User capabilities system that allows you to manage access to Event Espresso with your favorite user and role or capability plugin, e.g. Members, User Role Editor (not an official endorsement of which plugin to use), previously an add-on in EE3
https://wordpress.org/plugins/members/
https://wordpress.org/plugins/user-role-editor/
Event Espresso is designed more for single event managers and businesses, rather than building an entire network of sites. We’ve been asked this type of question many times and the deeper you get the more complex the technical difficulties become. You have to think about who receives payment, how do you distribute payments, or refunds or customer questions and complaints, how do you generate reports and restrict access. You could try to build something like that with Event Espresso but it’s going to need help from a good developer to build a lot of workarounds.
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Brian Monarch
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February 20, 2015 at 1:03 pm
Oh cool… Just out of curiosity, how come you posted plugins to 2 other role editors? Would I still need those others if it’s built in?
Would I be able to give someone the ability to login and create events and not have the ability to do anything else but create events?
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Josh
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February 20, 2015 at 2:48 pm
Hi Brian,
It turns out Event Espresso doesn’t have built in role editing, instead it adds custom capabilities that allows for fine-grained role management. You still need a plugin to edit the roles to give them access to EE4’s capabilities.
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Brian Monarch
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February 23, 2015 at 12:04 pm
First off, you guys are awesome with your responses. Whether it’s on email or these forums. But the product is very frustrating with the EE3 vs EE4. I know this is crying over spilt milk… And you may have heard this before. But the EE3 to EE4 jump you guys did makes this REALLY hard on my end. I finally found a payment gateway I like and they are going to give me a good rate. But they are not listed on your payment gateways for onsite payment. (USAepay) The lack of of onsite payment gateways and features make me not want to get the latest version. And it’s been out for so long now. I just wish you made one and somehow reprogrammed the first one to do what you needed it to do instead of adding a 2nd one to the mix. Who wants to buy older software that you aren’t going to be supporting down the line? Who wants to buy newer software with A LOT less features? I’ve never seen any other software have 2 versions like this. I’m sure it happens, but it’s so unattractive from a buyer’s viewpoint. I literally don’t know what to do. Get software that won’t be updated in the future… Or get the latest and wait for what seems like a very long time for it to catch up. Sorry… I’m not trying to be a pain or a jerk… But as I’m running into this payment gateways issue right now, and seeing all the features EE3 has, this just hit me. And I did some of this research many months ago and not much has changed except for a couple features that I won’t use. Then if I want USAepay to work, it looks like they’ll charge a lot of money to make it happen. Now I’m back to square one of finding software that has all the features and gateways, or picking a gateway with a higher rate. Or using older software that I won’t want to use once EE4 catches up.
Sorry about the rant. Just seems like EE4 has been out long enough that it should have a lot more gateways and add ons. What should I do?
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Josh
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February 23, 2015 at 3:25 pm
I can’t tell you what to do, but I can recommend Stripe with EE4.
As an aside, we didn’t build EE4 to make things harder for you. We built EE4 to make it possible to add new features that would not have been possible to add to EE3.
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Brian Monarch
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February 23, 2015 at 3:59 pm
I appreciate that… What does EE4 do that EE3 doesn’t do?
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Jonathan Wilson
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February 23, 2015 at 4:20 pm
Hi Brian,
For a full comparison, please see here.
?We’re happy to answer anymore questions you might have.
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Brian Monarch
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February 23, 2015 at 4:28 pm
Thanks… I noticed on your comparison chart for EE3 “Promotional Codes” had a check and for EE4 it did not. We can’t have unlimited discount codes for EE4? I have multiple people promoting the shows now on a different site and I track it by giving them each a discount code which saves their customer’s money and gives them credit.
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Dean
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February 24, 2015 at 12:53 am
Hi Brian,
We are still at a cross roads with EE4: the core of it is done, but there are areas still being built out and one of them is the promotional codes/discounts addon.
We decided to make it a separate addon in order to not only speed up core development but to enable us to add more complex features without bloating the core plugin.
I can’t provide a timescale for it, but it is being actively worked on and once ready we will announce it.
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