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Allen
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December 28, 2018 at 1:03 pm
I have received several phone calls and messages from people reporting that our Event Page says it is Sold Out. I have been unable to recreate the issue, but, due to the volume of calls we’re receiving – I don’t think it is a one-time issue or due to user-error.
Since I can’t replicate the issue, I have no idea how to troubleshoot this. I am hoping someone has seen this before or has enough expertise to help assess what is going on.
You can see our list of events here:
http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/amateur-events/
Choose an event from the list shown on the left. The issue has been reported for several of the events listed, so, again – just appears to be a random issue.
Please help!
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Allen
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December 28, 2018 at 1:17 pm
Also – I should mention that this is not happening every time for every user. People have been signing up daily with no issue. So, not sure what that means either.
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Tony
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December 28, 2018 at 2:10 pm
Hi Allen,
Are your events close to their ticket/datetime limits?
Are the events in high demand and you have a lot of visitors all at once?
Do you know if it’s the page with the ticket selector showing the event as sold out or is it as they try to go through from the event cart?
There’s a “reservation” system in place within EE to prevent overselling, to give a quick explanation say you have a ticket with a qty of 50.
5 users select 10 tickets each = 10 reserved ticket
If a user views the event page during the time those tickets are set to be reserved (by default it’s the length of the users session which is 1 hour) the event will show as sold out. Now let’s say none of those 5 users actually continue with the purchase, what will happen is when the session expires the tickets will be removed from reservation and the next person to load the event will see tickets available.
I’ve been looking over your events and not had any show that they are sold out, and I can’t be sure if the above is what is actually happening without more details, but it is the first place I would check.
Check to see if your ‘Sold’ tickets are relatively close to your ‘Qty’ fields (which could be on either the tickets, datetimes or both), or if you have a high number of reserved tickets which is taking you close to your ticket limit.
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Allen
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December 28, 2018 at 2:47 pm
Hi Tony,
Our event is March 28th, so, no – not close yet.
Not of the fields are even half full yet, so, plenty of tickets available.
I don’t know how many visitors at once – but,last year was our first year using EE and I did not experience this problem even once. The site gets much more traffic as the event draws near .. so, late Feb, March will get many more visitors.
I understand the “reservation” system, but, I don’t think that is coming into play here, considering how many tix are available.
Thanks for attempt to help .. any more thoughts??
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Josh
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December 28, 2018 at 2:54 pm
You can actually check to know for sure: The next time someone calls in and says the event is sold out, you can go in to the event editor for the event, then check the ticket editor. There you’ll see some columns labeled “Rsrvd”. If those numbers come close to the number of available tickets left, then the event will be temporarily sold out until those reserved tickets get released back into the inventory.
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Allen
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December 29, 2018 at 9:05 am
Ok, I have 1024 available and only 95 sold … unless I am reading something wrong. Do you see anything else here that may be causing the issue?
I can provide login details privately if a staff member is willing to help. This issue is of big concern to us, as our busy time is approaching …
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Tony
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December 31, 2018 at 6:52 am
Ok, I have 1024 available and only 95 sold … unless I am reading something wrong. Do you see anything else here that may be causing the issue?
Not unless you had a huge number of rsrd regs that have now expired, seems unlikely though.
I can provide login details privately if a staff member is willing to help.
We don’t really have enough to go on to narrow this down, without being able to reproduce its difficult to find the cause.
If you can send login details I’ll take a look over your events and see if anything stands out (note I’ll make no changes, just a review and comment from there), you can use this form to send login details:
https://eventespresso.com/send-login-details/
Do you know if it’s the page with the ticket selector showing the event as sold out or is it as they try to go through from the event cart?
Any caching in use?
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Tony
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January 4, 2019 at 8:54 am
Hi Allen,
In your form submission, you’ve mentioned you created a page/notice last year and that’s what people appear to be seeing, that’s a completely different issue to the above.
I tried to log in to view this but it looks like the credentials are incorrect, can you recheck and send, please?
Also, please provide some details how this ‘Sold out’ notice was created, is it just a standard page?
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Allen
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January 10, 2019 at 1:43 pm
Ok – I have narrowed this down, and I think I know what is happening.
After I create an event – I go into “Pages” and create a Page for the event, then I use shortcode to add a ticket selecter, etc…
For example, both of these pages are the SAME event:
http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/events/amateur-open-players-championship/
http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/open/
The first link is the URL your software created when I made the event. Since I “Duplicated” last years event to create the one for this year, the “sold Out” message is still there. I never clicked “Edit with Visual Composer” (The page builder plug-in I use) to see the page – I just updated details and embedded the shortcode in the second link.
BUT – I am guessing that some people are just googling our event, and finding your event listing page:
http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/events/
Instead of MY event listing page:
http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/amateur-events/
So – they are getting a link to your URL rather than mine. Know what I mean?
Is there a way to bypass your generated pages and just use my custom ones, with the shortcodes in there? Or do I need to format each page in the actual EVENT in the Event Espresso section?
Hope all this makes sense — would be sooooo much easier to talk to someone by phone for something like this.
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Josh
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January 10, 2019 at 3:09 pm
Hi,
Here’s a link I can’t share over a telephone call:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
You can download, then install the plugin, then add a redirect for /events/ to /amateur-events/
It will also help eliminate confusion if you can go in and edit the amateur-open-players-championship/ and remove the note about it being sold out. You can even add a redirect for that page if you’d like.
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Allen
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January 10, 2019 at 7:44 pm
ok, thanks! So, that will redirect all visitors to /events to /amateur-events … i see that
It dawned on me that many visitors were googling “Super Billiards Expo” rather than typing in the URL …And then randomly choosing the “Events” page. That must be how they were accessing it, which is why I was so confused by it.
Is there a way to just eliminate that “Events” page altogether? So it doesn’t show up in Google?
ALSO — I do not know why I made a “Page” for each event that I created … I could just edit the “Event” page that EE creates (http://www.superbilliardsexpo.com/events/amateur-open-players-championship/)
I am guessing that is the best way to do it? Looks like I just made a mistake – which had a ripple effect by causing other issues.
And lastly — what is best to do with the Events from last year that show “Expired” in EE? Will they show up in Search Engines? I am guessing they will not, but, figured I’d ask …
Thanks for all your help! Any advice is much appreciated – I obviously don’t know what I am doing here, haha
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Josh
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January 15, 2019 at 7:58 am
Hi,
If you redirect /events to /amateur-events then you’re effectively eliminating that page and it eventually will not show up in Google. Until it does, your site’s visitors will end up on the /amateur-events page.
If you do not want events from last year to be indexed by Google or other search engines, the recommended approach is to add a filter function that will request they not index those pages anymore. Here’s an example script:
https://gist.github.com/joshfeck/70979dc12f93ab25dd668ed4500be477
You can add the above to a functions plugin or, if available, into a WordPress child theme’s functions.php file.
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