OLX Ticket sales

Chris Davies

We are still playing with OLX for our donations and event registration. All new to us - but great fun.


Our website is being rebuilt - so this is all at the right time for us.


So, anyway - quick question for all of you.


I can't decide what to do about ticket sales - for events where there is no registration process. So where one person might buy 10 tickets, but we don't need to know all 10 names and details - just for the person buying the tickets so we can send them by post.


Have any of you used OLX for this - and have a website with it working right now so I can have a look at it?


Cheers

Daniel Noga 2

I'm not sure how this question applies to Online Express if there is no registration process and tickets are sent by post. That would be more an Events module question than an OLX one. That being said, I'll tailor my answer to OLX:


I'd wager that a majority of the tickets we sell fit into this category. When the person registering wants several tickets but doesn't know who they're going to bring, they typically just enter their own name into the guest fields.


Due to a bug that causes records to download incorrectly into the Events module when people do this, this situation is not optimal. In short, records tend to download incorrectly into Events when the Guest name(s) is/are the same as the main registrant name. The guests are supposed to pull over as Guest records under the main Participant record, but they instead pull in as totally separate Participant records, with the registration fees incorrectly allocated only to the main registrant instead of as separate fees for each ticket.


There is a discussion about this issue here: http://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/213/27482?post_id=98548#p98548


When this happens, the only fix is to delete the errant records and manually add the guests under the appropriate Participant record, and fix the Registration Fees manually as well. It's very tedious.


I'm not sure how to keep people from doing this in a way that's much more manageable than just fixing them; you might try setting up your registration forms so that they include instructions for how to enter guest names, but that's getting contrived and at the end of the day, not everybody is going to follow them or even read them.



WHen setting up guest records, the way I was taught for handling anonymous guests was to add them as guest records, entering the entire name of the primary registrant into the Last Name field, and "Guest of" in the First Name field. This way, they will be listed as "Guest of John Doe," for example. You can add numbers to them if you want but it's not necessary.