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Select your Own Seat Setup Steps

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NOTE: In order to see changes to pick-your-seat map online, you must re-create the pick your own seat map following the instructions. This is required for any changes to the main map such as:

  • increasing the number of seats on the map
  • changing the placement of seats by moving the seats or resizing them
  • changing the picture such as shape and/or background colour of sections on the map
  • changing of tool tips associated with a seat
  • renaming the seats locations (eg door, section, row, seat)

What the Patron Sees

Select your own seats allows patrons to click on specific seats on a map online after an initial set of best seats has been selected by Theatre Manager. The process is designed for speed and flexibility for varying degrees of sales volumes. When the sales volume exceeds hundreds of sales per minute, obtaining seats through a pick-first process would be extremely difficult (can't click fast enough). Refer to What the Patron Sees for more detail.

 

Setup Pick Your Seats Process

Making an SVG map for use with pick your own seats can take as little as a few minutes if you have the original PPT Powerpoint file. The general steps are:

The process will take longer if you meed to make adjustments to the PPT and/or your current seat locations to make your existing sales maps better prior to making the Pick Your Seats SVG map.

Use of pick your own seats can be:

There are some pre-requistes a venue must complete prior to enabling select-your-own-seat. You must

  • Completely set up the graphic map under the Graphic Map tab for box office sales.
  • Create an SVG graphic from your graphic maps
  • Merged in the seat locations using the Place Seats SVG Map button
  • Previewed and optionally altered the SVG graphic map using a tools like Open Office (free)

Pick your own is designed for modern browsers: IE11 and up, Safari, Chrome, Opera, Edge, Firefox running on Windows, OSX, IOS and Android.

The few remaining users of IE 10 and earlier represent less than 4% of the marketplace. They:

  • will see an 'x' on the web page where the map is displayed
  • will have to use the existing method of 'next best seat' to select other seats
  • May or may not see some random characters at the top of where the map is
  • have browsers that are not supported on many commerce web sites that have upgraded their security standards. (IE 9 is not PCI compliant in any way)
    • This is a recent internet wide strategy pushed by google and adopted by most browser developers.
    • It will have the effect of encouraging all people buying on the web (including patrons) to switch to IE 11 (or later) or another browser. Microsoft has dropped support for IE completely and only supports their Edge browser with windows 10.
    • You cannot provide support to these older browsers because the PCI council has deemed them insecure for e-commerce and against the merchant agreement.
    • Arts Management sees this 4% dwindling very rapidly - its easier to simply switch to a modern and more secure browser
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