September 2018 Newsletter
Welcome
It has been a busy month for Coconut Tickets with multiple updates as well as new events going on sale (including a 12,000 ticket firework event).
Recent improvements
Recently we added to the customers ticket and pitch buying experience by adding "my events". This allows a ticket or pitch buyer to create their own account on Coconut Tickets. In the short term this means that they don't need to enter their details again the next time they book which should reduce ticketing errors when a customer enters the wrong contact details by mistake (it happens). In the long term this will also give the event organizer access to a list of people who want to know when tickets are on sale for their next event.
Vendor pitches can be sold on Coconut Tickets for immediate payment or deferred until the event organizer confirms the booking. Unfortunately this meant that the terms and conditions that are only available on the checkout page were not accessible to a pitch buyer when they were only requesting a pitch and not yet paying for it. This has now been changed and the terms and conditions are available right the way through the pitch and ticket buying process.
To help existing and new subscribers understand their monthly costs better, a new tool has been added to the website pricing page. It asks you questions about your event, number of tickets and number of pitches and then tells you the best matching plan and the monthly cost.
Email Confirmations And After Sales Support
We have all experienced the frustration of ticket or pitch buying customers who haven't received their tickets in their email account. It is a problem facing every platform that sells tickets and this can result from one of many different problems and we are always looking for good solutions to this in order to reduce your after sales effort and to improve the ticket buying experience.
One of the causes of not receiving confirmation emails is when the customer enters their address incorrectly when booking their tickets. Coconut Tickets has recently added two new features to help tackle this. First there is the "my events" initiative where the the ticket buyer can create an account and then never needs to enter their contact details again. The second improvement is a tool that checks the email address entered on the booking form against known popular email addresses. If the address is not known then the customer is offered a suggestion of what the correct address might be or they can click to confirm that what they entered was correct.
Let's also not forget that an email may have been correctly delivered but was put straight into the spam folder of the customer. If they can't find their tickets then they need to check there too.
Coconut Tickets also offers an alternative to sending confirmation emails. Once checkout is complete every customer has the option to download their tickets. This probably works better on a desktop rather than a mobile device and it should help some people.
Product roadmap
Coconut Tickets has been helping event organizers sell events for more than 18 months. Ever since the first version went live we have been improving the product and aiming to offer more services and widen the user experience.
Our product roadmap is flexible. We listen to you and adapt the roadmap based on the feedback we receive. If there is something important to you that you can't find in Coconut Tickets then please contact us and we will tell you if it is planned or when we might be able to include it. We welcome your feedback
Checkout payment roadmap
Currently Coconut Tickets offers payment directly to your own PayPal or Stripe account without passing through Coconut Tickets, so you get your sales revenue as soon as the payment is cleared.
There are various types of PayPal, and a long time ago we decided to only support PayPal REST. This was mainly because this is the future direction of PayPal and they want everyone to use PayPal REST. However, there have been enquiries recently asking when we are going to support Classic PayPal (email and password only, no API keys), if this is important to anyone reading this then please let us know. We can add it, but only if we know it is going to be used.
New videos
In addition to the popular "Coconut Tickets Explained" video which is on the website front page, we have recently added two more videos that go into more detail. How to sell tickets using Coconut Tickets
How to scan tickets for event entry