Potential issue:  I set my "Max Tickets Available to be Sold" for this event at a certain level, but I ended up selling a couple more than that max.......what happened?

First off, the system is working just fine--so all of your other events should be just fine. What happened here is something that _can_ happen, although only on rare occasions.

Let's look at two examples:

1. You set up an event with a maximum of 50 tickets that can be purchased. Let's also assume that you've already sold 48 tickets. When Person A comes along and wants to buy 2 tickets comes to the site, they are allowed to begin the purchase process since only 48 out of 50 have been sold. Person A then completes his purchase process so that exactly 50 tickets have been sold.

Now let's say that Person B comes along and tries to purchase 2 tickets. What happens? Person B is not allowed to buy any tickets since the Total Ticket Max of 50 tickets has been reached. That's it. Simple and clean....the sales for this event are over.

Let's put an example timeline on this to illustrate:

10:00am. 48 tickets have been sold
10:01am. Person A begins the purchase process to buy 2 tickets.
10:09am. Person A finishes the purchase process to buy 2 tickets. (...it took a few extra minutes because Person A couldn't remember where he put his wallet with the credit card he wanted to use, and that took 5 minutes of hunting around his house.)
10:11am. Person B comes to the website and tries to begin the purchase process but isn't allowed to even begin the purchase process since the ticket max of 50 has been reached. Person B doesn't get to buy any tickets.

2. BUT, what if Person B had begun his purchase process _after_ Person A had started his purchase process but _before_ Person A had completed his purchase?

In this case, the timeline would have looked like:

10:00am. 48 tickets have been sold
10:01am. Person A begins the purchase process to buy 2 tickets.
10:06am. Person B comes to the website and tries to begin the purchase process and begins the purchase process since the ticket max of 50 has not yet been reached.
10:09am. Person A finishes the purchase process to buy 2 tickets. (...it took a few extra minutes because Person A couldn't remember where he put his wallet with the credit card he wanted to use, and that took 5 minutes of hunting around his house.) At this point, 50 tickets have been sold, but Person B already started his transaction 2 minutes ago, so now there is the potential for selling an extra 2 tickets beyond the original max of 50.
10:10am. Person B finishes his transaction to buy 2 tickets. Total tickets sold = 52.


Is this a bug in the system? No, it's not a bug since this is intended behavior.

Is it poor design? We'll prove to you immediately below that it's not poor design, either.

The way that we have set up the purchase process, we don't count tickets as being "sold" until they're actually sold.

There are at least 2 reasons for this:

1. It does happen from time to time--and more often than you might think--that a person _starts_ a purchase process but does NOT finish it. They get distracted, they change their mind about the purchase, they have computer issues.....there are a variety of reasons.

But the bottom line here is that not all of purchases that are begun get finished. If we started counting toward your Max Tickets Sold number based on how many purchases had been _begun_ (instead of based on how many purchases had been completed), there would be issues with this approach, too.

2. If we _were_ to have a system that "held" tickets from being sold to someone else for a period of time (which is essentially how a concert ticket system works), that could prevent you from selling tickets to someone else if, say, Person A just left a transaction hanging in mid-stream for a while but never completed the transaction. You (the merchant) could end up missing out on a transaction with Person B that you otherwise could have gotten.

And you would potentially have many more instances of people trying to initiate a purchase but get told that there were no more tickets available.....even though the person "holding" those tickets from getting purchased in some cases won't complete the purchase. So it becomes less of a first-come, first-served model.

So, bottom line, what is the best way of handling a situation where you have a very high-demand event and a strictly limited number of tickets? This doesn't happen often (or at least, not as often as many organizations would like), but when it does happen, here are two ways of managing the process.

1. High demand and strictly limited number of tickets available.
The best way that we have seen done on actual client sites involved a small amount of oversight on the part of an administrator. Keep an eye on your ticket sales as you approach the total # of tickets sold. Then as you get within 2 or 5 or 10 (depending on how quickly your tickets are moving), stop ticket sales. Uncheck the "Visible in Store" checkbox for all of your ticket SKUs. But put a new Ticket SKU online that is your "Wait Ticket"--this one will be visible, it will cost $0, and you'll have same (if any) members-only restrictions on it that were there for your regular tickets. Let people sign up for this. Then once you have the first few people who have signed up for this Wait Ticket, have an admin email the first person or two a direct link to the still-invisible ticket SKU so that they can buy the ticket.

In other words, as you get close to the max tickets sold, if you think that you will still have high demand that could come quickly, you have to add a bit of human intervention here. It's a special case that warrants it.

2. Extremely high demand and strictly limited number of tickets available.
What if you have an event where you've got a small number of tickets available; everyone knows when they will go on sale and is waiting for that moment; and the number of tickets you have is fixed and can't be changed.

Here's an example. One of our clients hosted an event in late 2010 where they had a total of 16 tickets available for a very high-demand, members-only event; they had pre-announced to a mailing list of over 4000 alumni when the tickets would go on sale; and they couldn't get any additional tickets. As it turned out, they had over 80 people try to buy tickets in the first few minutes after the tickets went on sale. How did they manage this overwhelming demand?

They set this up as a Wait List ticket and had people simply signing up for the Wait List from the very beginning. Then they started taking people off the wait list on a first-come, first-served basis and sending the first 16 people a link to purchase their ticket directly.