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liam_rc
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February 6, 2014 at 7:24 am
Hello,
I’m looking into various booking systems and I was hoping you could advise me whether Event Espresso would be suitable for my requirements.
Our client runs a factory and they want to open it up to the public for hourly tours. They will have tours every hour from 09:00 – 17:00 6 days per week indefinitely (they’re closed Sundays and public holidays).
We want customers to be able to see a weekly calendar which shows the different time slots per day and the number of tickets available per slot. We must be able to limit the maximum number of tickets to 40 per hourly slot, due to fire regulations we’re only allowed 40 customers at one time. Once the available tickets are sold out we want to blank out the time slot.
We want to sell different ticket types e.g Adult, Child and Senior. Each will have it’s own price. However, choosing a ticket type must respect the 40 ticket limit, e.g you shouldn’t be able to purchase 40 tickets per ticket type so 120 tickets. A few plugins we’ve tried don’t respect the limit and you’re able to purchase 120 tickets 🙁
We need QR codes which it looks like you offer as we want to check customers in at the door.
We also want to sell other merchandise on the website such as t-shirts. However, a customer may purchase these without purchasing a ticket. But we also want them to be able to purchase merchandise and tickets at the same time.
We also want to sell gift certificates which can be printed and used at the door to purchase a ticket or used online to take money off an order.
Finally, we need to use Barclays EPDQ gateway. I did find this 3rd party addon but I’m unsure if it’s will work, have you come across them before? http://www.sellxed.com/shop/en/wordpress-event-espresso-barclaycard-epdq-zahlungs-plugin.html
Any help and advice would be much appreciated.
Liam
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This topic was modified 10 years, 9 months ago by
 liam_rc.
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This topic was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
 Garth.
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Garth
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February 6, 2014 at 10:25 am
Hi,
With Event Espresso each hourly time slot would need to be a separate event so that you can limit registrations to 40. You’re going to have a lot of events though so I’d recommend the Recurring Events Manager (https://eventespresso.com/product/espresso-recurring/) so you can schedule these events to occur each hour 6 days a week. You can configure the calendar to display by month, week, or day format by default. The week format might be best.
If each hourly schedule is its own event then any combination of tickets can only sell 40.
Yes, with the Ticketing Add-on, JSON API and iOS App you can check people in at the door.
We don’t have a real official way to sell additional merchandise while registering, unless it is another ticket option. We have a Price Modifier add-on which might work for your situation, but I can’t guarantee that.
With the Social Coupons voucher you can accept coupons for 100% of their registration. We don’t provide a way to purchase them off-line. These vouchers need to be created manually (or in mass and uploaded to your website).
Personally I’ve not seen that integration so I can’t vouch for it, nor do we officially support it. If you want us to do an official integration then we do have a service: https://eventespresso.com/product/custom-gateway-development/
Does that help?
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liam_rc
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February 6, 2014 at 12:27 pm
Hi Gareth,
Thank you for your reply. Just to confirm, if I setup the events with the recurring plugin then each recurring event will have it’s own 40 tickets and they will respect the 40 ticket limit per event? Does this create thousands of products/events in the backend?
With regards to selling merchandise, I don’t mind an unoffical way, are there any tutorials or hacks for getting this to work? I did find something on the forum about using an event as a product, but I can’t find the link at the moment. Selling merchandise will a be an important part of the website and it would be great if you could either buy merchandise by itself or with tickets. But if this is 100% not possible then we might have to consider keeping them separate even though it’s not ideal.
Is it possible to edit the calendar? Is it a bespoke calendar or are you using a 3rd party calendar such as fullcalendar.js?
I’ll sign up to the test drive (https://eventespresso.com/pricing/test-drive-event-espresso/) as it would be useful for me to look at how the recurring events work.
Thanks,
Liam
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Garth
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February 6, 2014 at 5:32 pm
Depending on how long into the future the Recurring Events Manager (https://eventespresso.com/product/espresso-recurring/) will create many events (one for each occurrence during the day).
The Price-modifier add-on is what some people use to sell merchandise (https://eventespresso.com/wiki/espresso-price-modifier/) not sure if it will work in your specific situation though. The only concern I have for you there is whether you’d receive enough transaction (line-item) detail for customers. I think the record that they purchase merchandise will show up in the registration record as a custom question but not necessarily as an item in their purchase receipt; it will show in the registration question answers.
We are using FullCalendar.
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liam_rc
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February 7, 2014 at 2:24 am
From what I’ve read I don’t think the price modifier would work as you would need to purchase a ticket at the same time and then add to the ticket, where as we would want customers to have the choice to only purchase merchandise.
I think if we were to use Event Espresso we would have to keep the events and merchandise separate which is a shame as I can see us losing sales because of it as it’s confusing to the end user. But so far all of the ticketing plugins we’ve tested with WooCommerce don’t work as required so it looks like EE’s going to be the best choice. I’m sure there must be a lot of companies that need to sell tickets and merchandise at the same time so I hope it’s something you consider in the future.
I’ll need to do some more testing with the test drive website, I had a quick play last and I was getting a little confused with creating the recurring events. I’m not sure if I need to create a new event per time slot?
Thanks,
Liam
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Dean
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February 7, 2014 at 4:15 am
Hi Liam,
Yes it sounds like Price Modifier won’t work in your situation. An alternative option, though not ideal, would be to create an Ongoing Event as a product so create an event called T-shirt for example. Again it’s not ideal and would need some fiddling with CSS to remove unwanted info, but it is an option.
Recurring events, I assume you are allowing group bookings? If so then yes each time slot would need to be an event.
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liam_rc
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February 7, 2014 at 4:34 am
Hi Dean,
Thank you for your response. Your solution with creating a product as an ongoing event sounds interesting, are there any caveats? I don’t mind editing the front-end to remove any unwanted info via CSS. As long as on the front-end to a customer it just looks like a normal product then I don’t really mind how it functions in the backend.
Would we be able to control the stock of the ‘product’ and are we able to ask for shipping details from the customer? If we create these ‘products’ will they not automatically appear on the calendar?
Yes with the events we would like the option to have group bookings. I’m planning to have another play at lunch so I’ll let you know how it goes.
Thanks,
Liam
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Dean
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February 10, 2014 at 12:49 am
Hi Liam,
Yes there are caveats, the main one being that the user will have to add in name and email as a minimum again as it is a separate “event”.
In theory you could control this via CSS and JavaScript to copy the data over automatically and hide it from view, but it would need some developing.
Stock would be the event capacity.
Calendar wise, yes they would appear. Depending on the rest of your set up, you could set an overall category for the events and not add these items to that category and then only show that category on the calendar (there is not exclude function unfortunately).
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liam_rc
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February 10, 2014 at 5:12 am
Hi Dean,
It sounds like there are ways around the caveats and I’m happy to do some extra development work. Is it possible to edit the templates such as the calendar, a lot of plugins use template inheritance does EE? If I could edit the calendar code without going into the core then I could do a lot more with it.
I would probably setup a ‘Tour’ and ‘Merchandise’ category to keep them separate.
Thanks again for your help. I need to speak to my client again to see if they would be happy with this.
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liam_rc
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February 10, 2014 at 5:15 am
Sorry final question, do you have any future plans to officially include Products or to integrate with another platform like WooCommerce?
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Seth Shoultes
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February 11, 2014 at 12:23 pm
> Sorry final question, do you have any future plans to officially include Products or to integrate with another platform like WooCommerce?
Yes, integrating with WooCommerce is one of our long term goals.
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