The Tickets Held in a Shopping Cart window will list all tickets currently being held by the web listener. It can be accessed by going to Patron Sales >> Web Sales >> Manage Current Internet Holds.

The window lists the status of the cart, the patron's information and the performance details. To refresh the list click the magnifying glass in the upper right corner of the window.

The Status column will indicate if the cart is Active or Expired.

• Tickets in an active cart can never be released - ever. Thats because the patron has them in their shopping cart and, essentially, that would stealing from them. You can, however:
  • help the patron manually check out the shopping cart if they have logged in. You cannot do anything to anonymous shopping carts except let them expire -OR-
  • you can force the cart closed so that the tickets will release when the hold expires
• Expired carts rarely contain held tickets. If they do:
  • check the status of the ticket in a cart - if there was an issue checking the cart out, TM will hold the ticket for up to 96 hours so that you can manage this rare situation. You may need to add that ticket to the patrons cart, or use the Force Carts Closed button to manually release them.
  • In the rare event that a ticket is stuck as held long after the cart has expired, please see the steps below the image for details on released expired holds.

Forcing Carts Closed

If you chose not to manually check out the shopping cart for the patron, and the cart is active, you can force it closed. That means tickets will release in short order.

If carts are old and have any 'partially checked out' status error, or you simply want to force them closed, you can do so by:

• Opening the list of shopping carts and searching for the status codes of the ones you want to clean up
• Investigating why they are not complete, if necessary, and fulfilling ticket orders
• Selecting the carts
• Picking 'Force Carts Closed' in the menu
• You will see the image below. Selecting 'Force Close' will change the cart status to cart closed-operator forced it closed. Once carts are properly closed, the patron can be merged with other patrons.

The shopping cart detail window shows what was in the patrons shopping cart and allows you do do some specific things for the patron. Each of the tabs is shown in separate sections.

On the main window, most of the fields deal with the status of the cart and its value. There are two other fields of particular interest:

• Source Tag - which is a convenient way of tying back how people started the shopping cart. This can be used to determine how many people bought from an eblast, or another web site referral -- if the &TMsource=xxx tag is placed on the referring URL.
• User Browser - is the complete string indicating the browser version, platform and application that was talking to the server. You can tell if somebody used a mobile phone, ticket trove, safari and/or a mac, PC or linux machine to talk to the web listener. Refer to the Lookup Use Agent button below.

The Toolbar works as follows:

• Help - Provides help
• Delete - allows a cart with no detail to be deleted
• Print - print some of the lists from the cart
• Customer - if the patron signed in, this will open the patron record for a complete view of the patron. If it is an anonymous cart, you cannot view the patron
• Order - if the patron went through the checkout process, then the cart will be tied to an order. The shopping cart window shows what they wanted to buy - clicking on the 'Order' will open up the order and let you change what they actually bought.
• Checkout - serves two functions, depending on the state of the cart.
  • If the cart is 'Active' (and the patron logged in on the web), clicking on the 'Checkout' button will take the cart away from the web listener and add all the items in the cart to an order. At the end, you will be presented with the payment window so that you can ask the patron to provide a credit card.

    This helps you assist customers who call in to complete their cart, especially if they are having issues with their card not being accepted or they are uncomfortable providing it online for some reason.

  • If the cart is 'complete' and already checked out, it is possible that there are some tickets that are still on hold in the cart. This can happen in very rare cases of high server load. If so, then you can complete the process and convert a ticket on hold in the cart to being sold to the patron at the click of a button.
• Lookup User Agent - this will
  • copy the user agent string to the clipboard automatically for you
  • Open a web site that analyzes what a user string means
  • paste in the user string
  • Click 'Analyze' and that will interpret what the user string is for you (you can see a sample in the image below).

Many organizations wish to track how patrons purchasing online were brought to the online sales website. Generally, they are looking for answers to questions like:

• Did they click the link from the organization's main website?
• Did they follow a link in an email blast?
• Did they click a link from a partnering website?

Theatre Manager can track this information if the parameter tmsource is added to the URL. The information is a part of the patron's cart and can be used for reporting and tracking purposes.

 

How to use tmsource

The tmsource reference can be implemented two ways:

1. An internet cookie can be created called 'tmsource'. The text within the cookie can contain up to 100 characters. Using a cookie will prevent the tmsource from appearing in the address bar. The cookie will need to be created by the organizations IT person or web designer.
2. The tmsource option can be added to a link that points to an organizations online sales (See below for details).

Using tmsource is a character based field and does not require access to or changes within the Theatre Manager database. It does not require changes to the Code Tables within Theatre Manager. Do not put an '&' in the tmsource - as this is the parameter separator on URL's.

Note that parameters in a URL are case sensitive. Most keyword parameters are lower case unless they refer to an actual database variable. The documentation attempts to show proper case.

Adding tmsource to a Link

To create a link containing a source, add &tmsource=XX to any online sales link. Replace XX with the desired text representing the source the patron would have used to access online sales. The value for tmsource can be any value that meets the organization's tracking needs. Some example of possible options are below (prefix them with https://):

• tickets.yourvenue.org/TheatreManager/1/login&event=0&tmsource=MainWebSiteBuyButton
• tickets.yourvenue.org/TheatreManager/1/login&event=0&tmsource=Eblast2014-10-05
• tickets.yourvenue.org/TheatreManager/1/login&event=0&tmsource=TimesUnion
• tickets.yourvenue.org/TheatreManager/1/login&event=0&tmsource=FirstTimeBuyer

 

How tmsource works with Theatre Manager

Theatre Manager will accept the FIRST tmsource for the shopping cart sent from the patron's IP address. Meaning if the tmsource is set by the sender/referrer site, it will reference that location. If the patron accesses online sales from a location that does not contain a tmsource reference, the source for the cart will remain blank.

If tmsource is not set and the patron uses the back button or a historical cart, it may draw on a prior source value. This could cause a historical cookie to be accessed and create an erroneous source. Chances of that happening are very limited.

Cookies created by Theatre Manager last until the checkout process is complete. If a patron accesses online sales using a link with a tmsource and they complete the check out process, then come back for a second purchase, the tmsource cookie will have already been discarded. The second purchase will have no source at all if the patron does not leave the online sales site or does not access the online sales site using the same method as the first sale. This is the intended action as the patron has not accessed the site for a location the organization is tracking.

 

tmsource and Theatre Manager

When a source is added to an online cart it can be seen in the Cart Detail window as the Source Tag.

When generating any report that has data tied to shopping carts, the tmsource can be found in the Parameters window as Shopping Cart - Header >> Shop Cart Source. You can use that on most ticketing reports.

The criteria search is case sensitive. If using a source that contains multiple cases within one word please use the auto-capitalization override to make the field search option look identical to the Source Tag.

Looking at Source in the Shopping Cart List

In the Web Sales Shopping Cart, the tmsource value is located under the Cart Source column.

If a patron calls the box office and asks for assistance with a web sale, the box office has two options -after- the patron has logged in to the web site. The Box office can:

• talk the patron through the sales process. If you look up the shopping cart, you can use the Web Log tab to see what the patron is doing -or-
• 'take over' the shopping cart on the patrons behalf after instructing them that they will no longer be able to continue.

You might need to do this is the patron: has issues with their credit card or has been marked cash-only for prior non-payment.

To take over a shopping cart for a patron, the following must be true: Taking over a cart: the patron must have logged in to the web site -and- the cart must still be active -OR- Completing a checked out cart: there must be items in the cart that have not been checked out yet -and- the balance < 0 for the order -OR- You cannot take over anonymous carts. Tickets in anonymous carts must expire due to cart timeout before they are accessible.

Clicking on the 'Checkout' button provides a warning that you are about to take over the shopping cart for the patron and gives a chance to cancel the process. Once you continue with the checkout, the cart is marked complete and the patron will not be able to do anything with it.

As per the picture below, if you continue checking the cart out manually, Theatre Manager will

• Create an order
• Attach it to the shopping cart
• Sell all tickets in the cart and attach to the order
• Add all applicable fees, donations and anything else in the cart to the order
• Stop at the normal payment window so that you can finish the order by asking the patron for a credit card

Note: you can also ask the patron if they want any other tickets and purchase them manually as if this were a normal box office order.

You can complete a patrons shopping cart if, for any reason, the following three conditions are met for a cart:

• The cart has been checked out and completed successfully with a payment made to it
• There is a balance due to the customer (it looks like an overpayment)
• And there is at least one ticket in the cart that is in the status of Hold expires on xxx and is for this patron

In the example below, you can see that Bonnie Hamilton has a balance due of -$105.50 (red) and there is one ticket with the status of 'Hold expires ...' (blue) in the lower list. If Theatre Manager detects that it can help this situation, the checkout button on the toolbar indicates how many ticket can be fixed (it says 'Checkout 1 Ticket').

Click the 'Checkout x Ticket' button and you will see a dialog that confirms how many tickets Theatre Manager will attempt to convert from a hold status in this cart to a sold ticket for the patron and order number attached to this shopping cart.

Theatre Manager makes absolutely sure that it can move the ticket from hold to sold for this patron. If there are no issue during the checkout process, then the balance for the order will go to zero and the ticket will change to sold.

This completes the patron cart.