Ticketing for Online event accessed by unique codes

Hi all,

We are looking for anyone who can offer help or advice for a request we have got from our programming team.

We are looking to sell for a online event on Tess/TNEW which we can sell as a normal general admission event. We then need to somehow get to customers who has bought a place a unique, special 16 digit code so they can access the event online. What is tricky is that the codes we need to send to customers are provided by the producers of the event. I.e. they can't be something that comes directly from Tess automatically (like a ticket number). The producers provide the codes in advance of the event going on sale.

We also want to get the code to the customer asap after they have made the purchase, although the event itself is at a set time and date. We want to be able to sell right up until the event starts (ideally until 30 min before).

If anyone has found a good way to do this, or something similar, for any events they are ticketing for it would be great to hear a rough outline of how you did it!

Many thanks,

Donald
  • I've been doing what I call "post-order" emails for a few different events recently. The customer purchases through TNEW as usual, and we add a tiny bit of dynamic content to the TNEW confirmation email that basically says "further details are forthcoming". With the TNEW confirmation serving as a purchase receipt, the customer then receives an additional email within 3 minutes containing additional details -- in our case, something like a secret link to a watch page, or a unique calendar event add widget.

    This is implemented by running a SQL Agent Job every 30 seconds that scans for new orders and adds rows to T_TEMPLATE_QUEUE. You would need to build an HTML template for this email. In your case, prior to queueing the email as part of the SQL Agent Job, you would have some SQL code that assigns one of the unique 16-digit codes to the SLI no purchased by the customer -- you would need to load these codes into a local table ahead of time, and devise a table schema so that you can persist the SLI-code assignment. Inside your HTML template, you would pull the codes out of this table based on the SLIs in the order -- likely using the Custom/ DataService endpoints.

    Some other posts I've written recently that relate to this:

  • Hi Donald,

    We are doing something extremely similar! We are about to go live with this tomorrow actually. What we have done to solve this is that I created a couple of custom tables in the database to store the codes given to us and to store their assignments to patrons. I then created a custom procedure that takes in a lineitem id, checks to see if a code has already been assigned to that lineitem, and if not, maps it to the next available code. Then to get this procedure to execute as soon as possible after a patron purchases a ticket, I call it from within the order confirmation (we are using the new HTML template format) and it then returns the code for the patron to see in the order confirmation. Since most of this is done in SQL, you'll need to have some proficiency (or someone else in your organization) to set this up. Let me know if you have questions or want to talk further!

    Sara

  • Hi Donald!  If you have someone on your team who is a SQL wiz, I would definitely go with one of the other recommendations here, but if you are looking for a workaround, and your capacity isn't too gigantic, I have an idea. 

    You could use a venue that isn't GA, but treat it like it is (only have best seat with a zone of GA available to purchase online), but assign individual seat numbers as your individual code. That seems like it would be very time consuming to set up, and I'm honestly not sure if you can even assign that many character. It would however, be very easy to make show up on an email confirmation, and require no sql work. 

  • Reminds me a bit of the secret passwords that MONA were using for Dark Mofo.  Daniel Reid talked about it at ANZTRUC - TLCC 2017 mini magic is here   
    tessituranetwork-private.s3.amazonaws.com/.../MM17-34.pdf

  • Hi all,

    All sound like good ideas and in line with discussions we have had since I posted on this. 

    Really handy to have the extra resources to look at. Will pass on to my IT colleagues.

    Thanks again!

    Donald

  • Hi Jordan,

    Just to add that we are hoping we might be able to do this with some SQL magic but thanks for your suggestion. This might be handy for other things we are selling in the next few months. 

    Imagine this would involve building a new facility from scratch, so you can amend the individual 'seat numbers' to whatever you want them to be? 

    Thanks, Donald