Support

March 21, 2017 at 4:37 am

Just FYI, if you did set the end dates incorrectly, it wouldn’t say SOLD OUT, it prints up “We’re sorry, but all ticket sales have ended.”

March 22, 2017 at 9:24 am

Yes, but that’s because it came off sale when the course started. The problem happened before that. I’m not a total idiot! 😉

I noticed this at 10:30am on the 20th, 6 hours before it should go off sale. Note that it also would not have said SOLD OUT if the tickets were no longer on sale. I’m hoping it only happened that morning, but it could have been longer than that, and a lot of course sales happen in the last 3 days before the course goes on sale.

I understand that a lot of the time this kind of thing is down to user error. However, we have a fundamental problem with EE consistently selling out when it says there are more tickets for sale.

When we changed to PayPal Express this fixed most of our problems with EE, but this is still outstanding and can seriously affect our business. This is the most egregious example, but I would say we have to deal with EE being unable to sell out at the correct amount of tickets sold about 25% of the time.

March 22, 2017 at 11:50 am

So, just to be clear, if it gets sold out erroneously before the end date, do we still have to change the end date before pressing the reset button?

March 29, 2017 at 7:47 am

Unfortunately I am getting lots of chances to test this out, such as the following, where it’s apparently sold out despite almost half the tickets still being available:

Your solution ‘works’, in that it’s a way to manually reset problems. I press the reset button, then manually change the event so it isn’t sold out.

However, this relies on us checking every event that becomes sold out to see if it is a problem, and then manually fixing it ourselves. This can be very difficult as we have hundreds of live events, and they can become sold out at any time. The current solution requires a lot of man-power.

There are 3 better solutions to this that I can see, listed in order of preference with the first being the best (ignoring the ideal state where this doesn’t happen to us a couple of times a week):

1) If an event ‘sells out’ with less tickets sold than are on sale, then it would be great if EE reset the ticket and datetime reserved counts automatically after, say, 15 minutes, and then automatically checked to see if this meant it was no longer sold out.

2) Failing that, it would be good if EE sent out an e-mail when the event became sold out. This would be useful even if the base problem was fixed. I cannot see how to do this under message management currently, but would be pleased if you let me know I was wrong.

3) Failing that, I must be wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be an option to see a list of events that are sold out. I’m sure this functionality must be there so I guess I’m looking in the wrong place? Could you help me?

Basically, (2) and (3) would at least allow us to manage this problem until you fix the root cause.

Is there also a list somewhere where we can say when the state changed to ‘sold out’, so we can see for how long a period of ticket sales we have missed? This would assuage our customers’ fears.