When a customer has completed payment at checkout …whatever seats that were listed in their order will be reserved on the front end seat plan and immediately an email confirmation will be fired to both parties Admin and Customer. If you are providing E-Tickets the customer will have the opportunity to generate, download and print tickets at checkout success. If they are in no hurry to collect here they will always be prompted to access their customer account from a direct link in their Email Confirmation and anytime they wish to login to their Account and view their recent order.

How simple is that? Admin will view new orders each day. The system is happy in complete automation but it won’t always be that smooth. Forunately Admin can attend to refunds and even create orders through the Front End seat plan with the new osConcert Box Office system.

Deleting and refunding orders is easy and Admin will be prompted to restock seats automatically so that they will be made available on the front end seat plan again.

Some event managers will use osConcert entirely as a reservation tool, making most of the reservations themselves on behalf of their customers but also allowing anybody to reserve seats online. The status of the order can be kept at ‘Pending’ until payment is received for sure …then Admin can open the order and update the Order Status to ‘Delivered’. Making this setting will usually allow immediate access to E-Tickets in the customers account. Admin also has the option of notifying the customer by email the moment the order is updated and payment is received. Ideal for Bank transfer and Cheques.

Supposing there’s only one payment method?….and that is Credit Card payment in the front end checkout?…How can Admin efficiently make private orders without using the Credit Card module all the time?
This is where osConcert’s new Box Office online system comes in handy.

We make the Box Office a Zone and Admin can nominate certain customer accounts to be in that Zone as Box Office or some kind of Agent. We create a Box Office payment module that can bypass Credit Cards but only can be seen by our nominated Box Office Staff. That way BO can speedily make orders through the LIVE front end seat plans from anywhere and Admin can monitor sales in the osConcert Report by each of the nominated Box Office Staff and Agents. That makes life so much easier for our event manager.

We can take your venue and create it’s functional seat plan and then arrange and duplicate the venue plan in a way that YOU the event manager can manage reserved seating visually, online for however many shows you need.

We like to work with you from the outset to finalize a plan that will help you manage your ticket selling for years to come.

In a way, …the seat plans and the menu set up will be set in stone and all you will need to do is confidentally manage each show as it comes without fear of disturbing the database. If you have problems or in need of changes osConcert support is always there to help.

Each and every customer is provided with the essential files that make up the seat plan as in SQL and CSV (MySQL database imports) If ever the base software changes these files will always be useful in any future upgrades.

osConcert MULTI base software is maintained constantly by cartZone UK. All customers are notified of upgrades and security patches whenever they become available.

Let us just prepare the ground for a well organized seat ticket selling operation that doesn’t have to be a ticketing nightmare.

• Let’s look at the seats as ‘Products’ for sale and each product has a quantity of ’1′. Each page of the menu will lead to a page of the seat plan and each plan will be a section of products in the database.
• We have a section of products all with a quantity of ’1′ and a status of ’1′. Status will represent the ‘stock’ of the product. In our case …’1′ = ‘in stock’ , ’0′ =’out of stock’

We will have a ‘Control Panel’ in our admistration so that we can easily manage our loaded shows. When we RESET a section from the Control Panel we reset the color coded seats by returning the ‘Quantity’ to 1 and the ‘Status’ to 1 respectfully.

That was a brief idea of the ‘Products’ based part of the system. Now let’s take a brief look at the ‘Orders’ based part of the system.

Just like any usual shopping cart system a product is added to the basket and eventually all products in the customers basket are taken to the checkout for order conformation and ultimate purchase.

As with osConcert, seats are products and the status of each product is changed to ’0′ out of stock. This tells our seat plan to block out our seats and show them as reserved. The orders department collects this information and it will remain on file until the orders are deleted permanently. This is why we need to set the products for each show we launch with a unique DATE ID. We must distinguish each product order with each new event for the benefit of our osConcert REPORTS.

Our sales reports will give us downloadable details for each and every event, just as long as we understand why we needed a unique ID in the first place.

After each event is concluded, we will RESET the seat plan and prepare the unique DATE ID for the next event.

Now that we understand the relationship between the PRODUCTS and the ORDERS. We should prepare the ‘Concert Details’ and the ‘E-Ticket’ details carefully. Afterall if we have PDF E-Tickets enabled we will be selling PDF E-Tickets as a downloadable product and we dont want to be making mistakes that could mislead your customers.

In our ‘Concert Details’ control panel we will see a list of our seat plans (sections) where we are able to edit our SHOW details. Where there is a Concert Name for the web page menu…the Concert Heading Title will be reserved for the Concert Name on the face of the E-Ticket.

Venue, Date and Time will also be represented as ‘place holders’ on the E-Ticket as well as at the web page.

It is here we must also edit the DATE-ID as explained earlier. To avoid any confusion it is IMPORTANT to start each show with a unique ID.

Prices are edited by color code for each section and can also be represented on the face of the E-Ticket by a place holder.

When all details are set correctly it is good to know we can hide or show each section of our seat plans in the menu by enabling the green (show) or red (hide) buttons in the left hand side of our control panel.

Ok …what I have explained here will go a long way to help you release your seats to the general public without too much confusion because if you understand these basic guidelines all you will need to do now to speed up the process of your online ticket selling operations is to help your customers understand your system and belay any fears they have of the online process.

You’ve prepared, you’ve launched, you’ve done your marketing…your customers are reserving and purchasing tickets of which they may now have printable proof as in E-Tickets, Email Order Receipts and Customer Invoices. You as ‘Administrator’ have a wonderful overview of seats sold and reserved. Your ‘Agents’, ‘Call Centre Staff’ and YOU the Event Manager can also have fun reserving seats on behalf of the customers who do not want to go online. Now let’s look at what it takes to collect payment and to make sure you know who has paid and if you have received payment?

How to manage payments