How to create seated events with automated social distancing

If you already have a Ticketor account, then sign in to your account by browsing to your Ticketor link. Otherwise Sign up on Ticketor.com. It takes less than a minute and requires no credit card.

Fill out your basic information on the sign up form, choose an address for your Ticketor portal and click on the button.

Choose any plan at this point as all the plans support all the ticketing features you may need. Moreover you can always change your plan at a later time.

Click on the sign up button to see the confirmation page.

Your ticketing and reservation system is ready and you can navigate there using the link on the confirmation page to configure it, customize it and create your events, store, gift cards, etc.

When you first land on your website, or a new page of your website, a walk-through pops up. Go through the steps to learn about your Ticketor site or the page you are on. It takes just a couple minutes and it is the fastest way to make yourself familiar with the site or that feature. It will save you lots of time down the road.

Creating an event on Ticketor is quick and easy. Let’s quickly create an event.

Please note that although we use the term “event” in this video, the concept can equally apply to any activity that may require ticketing, admission, booking or reservation.

I can create the event from the quick links section, or from the “Control Panel”, “Events” button.

It pops up an “Event creation wizard” that I can use to create my events basics before going to the actual event editor that offers plenty of options and customizations.

Alternatively, I can close the pop up and use the event editor.

• Set the event title.
• Select the event type.

  The event can be “Online” or “In-person” . Online events can be “Live” or “On-demand”. You can use on-demand events to easily monetize your videos.

  In-person events can be “assigned seated” or “General admission” or a combination of both. “Assigned seated” events allow the buyers to pick their seat on an interactive seating chart. Ticketor offers a state-of-the-art seating chart designer tool that allows you to build any seating chart including, theater style, round-table dinner style, restaurant or cabaret style, night-club style or any combination of them quickly and easily at no charge.

• Select or create a venue. Venue is the physical or virtual place where your event happens. For seated events, the venue also contains the seating chart.
• Select the date and time of the event. If the event is recurring, you can set the date and time to the first recurrence and later-on set the schedule.
• Optionally upload an image or flyer for the event
• Set the tax or vat and social distancing setting

• Set the prices and pricing structure.

  Ticketor price levels and variations, gives you full flexibility to create all kind of pricing. If the event is assigned seated, it also lets you set multiple prices per seat such as kids price vs adult price.

  You can add as many “price levels” and each “price level” can have as many “price variations”.

  Some example of price levels and variations are:

  • General Price
  • VIP
  • Kids
  • Seniors
  • Members
  • Time-based pricing such as
    • Early-bird
    • Last-minute
  • Group based pricing such as
    • Couples ticket
    • Family ticket
    • Group of 10 or more
    • 2-day ticket
    • Weekend pass
    • Multi-session or multi-day tickets

  Price levels and variations can have their own face price as well as the fee or the service charge that the buyer pays to you as you are the one who sets and collects the service charges and you can charge as high or as low as you like.

  They can also be “Password protected” and hidden from general public.

  Note that, you can change the pricing and the capacity at any time and the changes will be effective immediately.

• Add a payment processor or my PayPal

  Payment processor is a financial service that allows you to charge credit and debit cards and deposits the money in your bank account. Most payment processors, except for PayPal, are behind the scene and the user doesn’t know about their name or brand.

  We support most common payment processors including Stripe, Square, PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, …. If you don’t have one, you can simply get a Stripe or PayPal account in a couple minutes and use it right-away.

  Click on Stripe or PayPal button, sign in to your account or fill out the sign up form to get a new account, and click on the button to add that to your account.

• Finish the event creation wizard and it will take you to advanced event configuration.

  There are lots of settings and configurations that allows you to customize the event.

  Complete the event by adding the event description, fine-tune the settings, add your flyer and video.

  You can also:

  • Set the event’s sales start and end date and time
  • Specify what delivery methods are available for the event
  • Set your return or exchange/upgrade policy so buyers can upgrade their tickets or change the date without contacting you
  • Set the event categories, type and genre
  • Set the event availability, restrictions or make it available to certain group or protect it with individual passwords
  • Add questions for the buyer to answer
  • Add related events, merchandise, gift cards or donations to the pre-checkout page to up-sell and promote them
• And finally test the event as an event buyer by going to the “purchase ticket” page and make sure everything works as expected.

Now that we have a Ticketor account and an event, we can proceed to add social distancing features.

Edit your assigned seat, theater-style event and go to the “Tickets” tab > “Social Distancing” section.

1. Set the number of seats to leave vacant between each attending party. For example, if you set the number to 3. The system will automatically block 3 seats on each side of each reservation.
2. If you want to enforce a capacity cap for the venue, also set the “Capacity cap due to social distancing” to the maximum number of tickets you want to sell across all price levels and variations.
3. To block one-row (or 2) between each party, on the “Add / Update tickets” page, where you add tickets on the seating chart, add tickets to every other row. This is how you can maximize the available seats.
4. You can also set the “maximum party size”. To do so, edit each price level or variation and set the “Maximum number to purchase” to the maximum party size.
5. If you are concerned that you are going to have a lot of wasted seats because of the social distancing blocked seats, you can restrict the buyers on how they can pick their seats. For example, you may want to not allow buyers to pick seats in the middle of a row and limit them to the left and right side of the aisle. To do so, from the “Details” tab > “Options” section, “seating chart” box, choose the proper option.
6. You can always unblock the automatically blocked seats from the “Add/Update tickets” page.

For example, of theater-style events with social distancing, check out the following events on our demo site:

• Event with Social Distancing Assigned seat event in a concert hall / 1200 seats
• Free Church Service with Social Distancing Assigned seat event in a church (Reservation only)

For round-table events, you may want to make sure that the whole table is being purchased by 1 party only and so the parties cannot share tables.

To do so, edit the price level / variation and set the “Minimum number to purchase” to the size of the table.

Recurring events, with time-slots, that can be used to limit the visitors to an event or activity are explained in details at the following blog:

How to create recurring events, classes or booking system with time-slots, using Ticketor

For general admission events, you can set the “Capacity cap due to social distancing” to the maximum number of tickets you want to sell across all price levels and variations.

You can learn how to create a seating chart using the Ticketor’s seating chart designer tool in the link below.

Ticketor's Seating Chart Designer Tool

You can learn about creating online events at the link below.

How to create ticketed online event (live streaming or on-demand) or monetize your videos

For more information about other social distancing features, check out: Social distancing and COVID19 related features

There are many things you can do to enhance and optimize your Ticketor portal. Here are a few:

• Design your site: Change the colors, upload your logo, email header and background pictures.
• Add merchandise or gift cards to your store
• Make yourself familiar with the Point Of Sales (POS) page so you can sell tickets face-to-face or over the phone, in as many ticket booths or retail locations.
• Add a donation page and add donation to your checkout flow
• Review all Ticketor features from www.Ticketor.com to learn what else are available and can potentially be useful to you.
• Also check out the Help and Instructions page, scan the topics to know what are available and get ideas
• Move the site to your domain or sub-domain so the address of the site will change from Ticketor.com/[Your business name] to www.YourDomain.com or tickets.YourDomain.com
• If you have another website and want to integrate Ticketor with that, design your Ticketor site have the same feel and look as your other site. Match the items in the top navigation menu on both website so visitors can easily navigate between the two sites. Link to your Ticketor site or pages from your main site or embed the ticketing page, or any other page into the other site. If you have a WordPress site, use our WordPress plugin for integration.
• Use the website builder features and add different type of pages such as:
  • Online store
  • Donation page
  • Gallery page (photos and videos)
  • Blog or news page
  • Reviews page
• Also edit the text / graphic on your pages and add a beautiful slideshow banner
• Make yourself familiar with the Gate Control app that allows you to scan tickets using any device with a camera and browser and admit buyers by scanning the barcode or QR-code on their tickets, or by looking them up by name, email, phone number or confirmation number. Gate control also supports ‘Exit and Re-entry’ so you don’t need to stamp attendees.
• Introduce yourself to your dedicated support engineer. Ask as many questions. Ask them to review your site, evet or process. Schedule a Zoom meeting with them.