Sell Items und Tickets

Becoming an Organizer

Two steps are necessary in order to become an Organizer at Ticket-Bob: 1) you will need a customer account and 2) you need to order a license. This license defines what services and features are provided to you as an organizer. Most individuals will be happy with our Free Bob license.

Go to My Bob and select your license. Checkout at your shopping cart to order the license. That's it. You can start immediately.

Your Organizer Profile

Your organizer profile explains to your customers who you are, how to contact you and defines further settings about how Ticket-Bob advertises your tickets, items and donations. The basic language setting for your organizer is done here, too. Your products will be displayed in these languages.

An important piece of your profile is your profile image. It shall be at least 1200 x 420 pixels to avoid scaling issues on bigger displays.

Done! You are ready to plan your first event.

Planning an Event

An event can be a real-life, personal meeting organized by you. Or it is a simple online conference or donation campaign. Whatever it is, it all starts by clicking on the green button on our homepage or on your organizers profile page.

Base Data

The title, location and time of your event is defined in this section. You also can save your event as a draft only so it will not be displayed on your organizer profile page yet. This is the default setting. So make sure you uncheck this box when you want to publish the event.

Attention! Some licenses limit the number of sumultaneously active events. Ticket-Bob will save your event automatically as a draft when this limit has been reached. You will not lose any of your data.

Details

The blue bar on top of the form is a navigation bar. Click on "Details" to further describe your event to your potential customers. You should write about the event's purpose and content and what will happen when a participant needs to void his ticket because he cannot attend for some reasons.

You also define here when Check-In of your event will start.

Eventually, you define what language will your event be held in, e.g. English or German.

Website

The website section describes how your event will be displayed on Ticket-Bob. First, there is a unique slug identifying your event. This is the part of the URL that follows your organizer name. A sample address is https://www.ticket-bob.com/en/my-organizer/my-first-event - where "my-first-event" is the identifying slug. This address can be distributed to your friends and customers to directly access your event. You can leave the slug empty. Ticket-Bob will automatically generate a slug for you.

The Visibility defines where your event will be listed:

• Public on all pages means that anyone who visits Ticket-Bob can search, find and view this event.
• On organizer homepage only will display the event on the organizer profile page only. So visitors will not find it on other pages.
• Private events will not be listed anywhere. Even not on your organizer page. That mans that visitors can see them only when you give them the web address. People passing by are not able to see it.

Additionally you can protect your event with a custom password. Visitors will need to enter this password when they want to see yr event or order tickets or items from it. Visitors without a password will be barred.

You can give an email address that people can use to contact you. The default is your customer e-mail address.

Customer Details

This section is currently of no effect for your event.

Selling Items and Tickets

This section explains how to create items and tickets for an event in order to sell it to customers. Important: Ticket-Bob allows you to either sell items and tickets or to give it for free. Transaction fees will be charged to you only when a customer payment is involved.

Items and tickets share a few characteristics: the need a description, have images or are sold within a certain time period only. Also, you define how many of these products you have in stock to be sold. But there are differences too:

Tickets

Tickets are the default way of how to enable attendees to check-in. Customers purchase those tickets on Ticket-Bob, receive them electronically by e-mail and you will verify at check-in whether the tickets presented are valid or not. The Check-In tool provided by Ticket-Bob will support you here. Check-In will be described further down. However, that means that tickets are sent by e-mail only. Delivery by postal or courier service or a pick-up are nnot available for them. Instead, tickets are either delivered by PDF or saved electronically in a smartphone's wallet.

Tickets for online events will not be issued at all. You will need to distribute information about how to attend the event yourself. Ticket-Bob provides a special e-mail service to support you here.

Items

Items are usually physical goods that can be sent by a postal service or a courier, or they will be picked up by the customer yourself at your pick-up locations.

You will need to check the destination country list when offering an item for delivery. Ticket-Bob supports European countries at this point only. You also need to define delivery fees. These fees must be given per item. You can define different delivery fees for different numbers of items purchased, e.g. € 1.00 (each) for 1-3 items and € 0.50 (each) starting with 4 items.

You need to define pick-up locations at your organizer profile in order to provide pick-up possibilities. You can define as many such locations as you require. When creating and editing a product, you can select the pick-up locations where this product will be available. Each pick-up location includes a description that will be displayed to your customers.

Exceptional Case: Donations

Ticket-Bob was initially developed in order to collect donations. Customers can enter the donation amount when using this product type. So customer can decide themselves how much they want to donate. You can also combine a donation with an item for purchase. Many non-profit organizations offer items and customers can donate additional money.

There is no difference whether you represent a non-profi organization or sell as an individual. However, non-profit organizations can benefit from a few extra features such as VAT handling and donation receipt issuance. Please contact us using the support e-mail address to enable these features for you. Apart from this, there a almost no limits implied from your license when collecting donations. Ticket-Bob was developed during Covid-19 pandemic lockdown to enable organizations for online collection of donations, without too many extra costs.

Product Availabilities and Waitlists

You need to define the number of items you have in stock for each product (or the number of products you want to sell). Ticket-Bob keeps track of this number and stops sales when the stock is empty. The sale can be resumed only when you stock-up again. This is the default behaviour for most products.

There are special circumstances though that require you to collect registrations or reservations first. A very low number of available products or seats in an event with a big number of potential customers could be such an example. You don't want to apply the "first come, first serve" method on them but choose yourself who will get the product or seat. That's why the waitlist feature was created. You simple check the "manual order confirmation" box and the waitlist is activated. Customers can now show interest in buying your product or ticket and are not required to pay yet. You will select the orders that you want to confirm in your Order Center and those you want to cancel. Ticket-Bob will support you with a special feature: the random selection. However, you can use your own criteria for selection. Customers will receive an order confirmation e-mail, an invoice and the payment request when you confirm customers from your waitlist.

Another way to create a waitlist is an empty stock. You can enable the automatic waitlist for these cases so that more orders will be allowed but held on waitlist. You then process the waitlist the same way as described before.

Finally, waitlists are a good solution for events when participants suddenly cancel there attendance. You can confirm other attendees then from your waitlist.

Please notice that donations that you combine with other products are collected only when those products were confirmed. There will be no donation as long as the combined product is held on waitlist. That's why it is recommended to offer pure donations, too.

Product Variations

Items, tickets and donations can be offered in different variations, such as size, color or other attributes. Variations can be used for packages that you combine too. Ticket-Bob will offer a simple selection of these variations to your customers.

Technically, variations are multiple products that are linked together. You will setup each of these variations as you would do for individual products. The link is the so-called Variation Scheme. It defines what criteria are used to distinguish the variations, e.g. color or size. Follow these steps in order to create variations:

1. Create the first product, e.g. a T-shirt in XL and white, and save it.
2. Click on "Variation Scheme" in the context menu of the new product and define color and size as the attributes.
3. Edit the first product again and complete the attributes for the variation (white, XL).
4. Create other variations by using the context menu of the product. All data of the product will be taken over for the new variation and you can simply edit it.

Please make sure that you describe the values of the variation scheme attributes in exactly the same way for all products (for all languages used). That means that you need to always write "white" and not "white color" sometimes. Ticket-Bob will compare these values carefully to display the available options to your customers.

Uploading Images

Regardless whether you want to upload or edit the picture of your organizer profile, your event or any product - you will always find the upload image action in the context menu, not when editing the object. Please note the following, required sizes:

• Organizer images: 1200px x 420px
• Event images: 400px x 400px
• Product images: 400px x 400px

Your images are scaled and cut automatically when uploading. You can define the visible area but not the scaling. That's why it is recommended to edit your pictures in your favorite image editor to scale and cut it to the best size. This will ensure the best result.

Product Catalogue

All your tickets, items and donations - your products - can be managed in the product catalogue. You can create new ones, view and edit the existing products. All the features already described above will be offered here:

• Create, edit and delete products
• Upload images
• Create and edit variation schemes
• Create and edit variations of products

Please notice that you cannot delete products that are part of an active order. Editing the time period for sale is the better way to remove such product from sale.

Order Center

The Order Center enables you to manage and edit the incoming orders. A filter panel and a search field allow you to limit the number of orders displayed or find a specific order. We recommend to use the Order Center on desktop screens only.

Processing a Waitlist

You can manage orders on waitlist by selecting the respective items and using the context menu at the end of the table to confirm those items. Ticket-Bob can also select items randomly for you. A special option will ensure that the random selection will always select all items in a single order. This allows you to confirm the complete order or none of its items.

Setting Labels

Labels will help you to organize your orders. These labels are words that are sticked to items. You can label items with a name of your employees so he finds these items later or you use labels to prioritize orders. The search field at the top of the page allows you to search for such labels.

Labels are visible to you only. Customer will not be able to see those labels.

Sending Documents

You can send documents such as order information, delivery or pick-up notifications, invoices and donation receipts for individual or multiple orders. The dialog will let you choose who will receive those documents: you (the preset) or the customer of an order. Simply click the respective action in the context menu.

Ticket-Bob sends documents automatically to your customers during the order processing.

Changing Order Status

You can change the status of the order, e.g. confirm items for dispatching, cancellation etc. You can usually revert the change in case you made a mistake. Ticket-Bob will inform that customer after a certain delay only to account for that.

Export Orders

All orders displayed (found by filters and search) can be exported to an Excel file. This offers you the possibility to track the offers externally, generate statistics and extract other information from it - or to simply archive it. The Excel file will contain all data relevant to an order. However, be aware that you need to repect local data protection laws, such as GDPR in Europe. So use this feature carefully.

Pickup Center

The Pick-Up Center is designed to ease your daily life when it comes to the pick-up process. You need to select the correct location first. Then you can prepare and confirm pick-ups.

Preparing a Pick-Up

A pick-up needs to be prepared after a customer paid for it. You will find these orders in the section "Prepare pick-ups". Once, you have packaged the order accordingly, confirm preparation. The customer will receive an information that you are ready for him. He also receives a pick-up code.

Performing a Pick-Up

The customer will simply give you his pick-up code when he is at your pick-up location. Enter this code in the search field of the Pick-Up Center, hand-over the items and confirm the pick-up. That's it!

Reconciliation and Payouts

Ticket-Bob collects all payments for you using third-party payment providers. This ensures that you always have latest payment methods available to you and you don't need to worry about details. All payments of your customers are reconciled at the end of each month and paid to you. This service is covered by the transaction fee that you need to pay for each payment of your customers. The payouts to you will be reduced by this fees and hence will not be equal to the original order totals.

Your payouts are listed under the same context menu item in your organizer profile. This includes previous and current payouts. Details about the orders included in the payout will be available to you by a single click. As soon as a single payout is reconciled, Ticket-Bob will send you the invoice document by e-mail, containing all order totals and fees in detail.