Ticket process overview

[Admin]

Just want to take a minute to elaborate on the ticket process a bit.

The dark days... were indeed dark and risky.   We no longer have paper tickets so I won't dwell on that anymore than that I thankfully will no longer have to wander through Parkdale carrying a garbage full of 20's to the bank to pay off my credit card.

I think it's important for people to understand the ticket process and why and how I do it this way.

Why

1. We need to control the section.   The entire section is  managed.  First time ticket buyers do not get to take over the front row where the capos and drums are.  None of this happens by accident.   This could lead to things being kind of cliquey but it's pretty fuzzy placement wise and depends on the stadium too so it's not much of a worry.

2. We need to know who is in our section. If we go the TM route we will not ever know who anyone is which does not help us build other things like events outside of games, or even promoting the next game.

3. Ticket pricing is cost + pay pal fees round up to usually the nearest dollar.    We are almost always in the bottom tier very large group pricing.   What is problematic is the immediate price on the ticket does not reflect what we pay.  It can be kind of confusing depending on which stadium system it is being spit out of.    It might say $15 on the ticket, but there are fees in there that bring it up $19.00 and we end up charging $20 as a round figure and receive $19.12 from Pay Pal.  People who payed $20, see $15 and think we are making $5 / ticket.   We don't.

4. The biggest advantage is being able to group purchases.  Many of our people are active recruiters for games.  Getting someone to go to a game is a lot easier if you will sit together. So if you buy five tickets, and need three more later I can group those orders no matter when they were purchased..... try doing that with Ticket Master.....nope.

 

How

1. First off I want to say that Canada Soccer is great to deal with when doing ticketing, they are extremely helpful.

2. When the order is processed, I get a massive PDF of tickets. 

3. This PDF has to be separated into individual PDF files.  Each with someone incredibly useless file name like TM-95583-93.  

2.  Each individual PDF must be renamed according to the seat number contained within the PDF.   
So TM-93434-93 becomes 114-row8-seat14.    This helps me, but also alleviates mistakes on the user end.  If someone buys 20 tickets they are less likely to send the same ticket twice. 

3. Check every single file, twice.

4. Download the Pay Pal log file and convert it to Excel

5. Clean up all the unnecessary info and make a manageable file of info on who bought tickets.  Divide them up by section and break into separate file. 

6.  Check to see if people bought in multiple sections.  Sometimes people buy tickets for others, other times they just make mistakes or a section was sold out.  Move & sort accordingly.

7.  Consolidate all orders by section based on email so they are seated together. 

8. Write up a canned email response and insert into every email, attach correct number of tickets...

9. Double check sent ticket totals match spreadsheet.  If you don't, you can no longer seat their additional people together and you have to move them.

10.  Once done, go back into Gmail and search every single ticket file name in Gmail to ensure only one email shows up.  This tells you if you sent a ticket twice.   If you send the same ticket twice, the second person to get to the stadium will not scan in. Imagine doing this with 3000 tickets.

11. Go drink lots of beer.