Using Convio as transaction processor with your own front-end

John Burkhardt

I'm wondering if anyone does this or knows of any Convio clients who do this for event registration:

Use Convio as your e-commerce processor, and to manage RSVP lists and such, but provide your own front-end UI and integrate with Convio through an API.

I've looked at the Events API - it doesn't seem as if there are enough objects and methods available via the API to do this. I've been wondering if it could be done via the Transactions API.

It seems that the current Convio end-user UI and built-in back-end processes don't accommodate all the different kinds of events we do. A big example is a lecture series where a person can buy individual tickets to one lecture, or can buy a series ticket to all the lectures in the series at a price that is less than the total cost of each individual lecture. We want the purchasers of series tickets to be included in the guest lists for each of the individual lectures, not on a separate list of series ticket purchasers.

John B.

University of Washington

Corey Pudhorodsky

I think it would be difficult to use the calendar events to offer the series tickets at a discount and still report on the ticket purchases in a single list. Like you point out, the Events API still doesn't offer the ability to write event interactions into the constituent record, so you wouldn't be able to use that as a solution either.

Though neither of these will hit what you are looking for 100%, two options that you might want to explore if you haven't already checked them out:

1) Configure a multi-part event that spans over the length of the series and has an optional registration. The optional registration would encompass registration for the entire series but then you can include additional child events that require a ticket registration. The report would be a consolidated single report for the entire series but you'll have to break apart the ticket sales for each lecture from that report.

2) Consider is actually using eCommerce to sell the tickets. The downside to this is that you would loose some of the calendar functionality that Events offers, but with eCommerce you can offer discount codes. Each ticket can be an eCommerce product, and discount codes can be associated with specific products.

Like I said, neither of these are perfect, but if you're flexible with your registration process requirements, you may be able to make one of them fit.

Corey