Collecting vendor documentation with Coconut Tickets booking form

For each vendor pitch sale you can define your own booking form. As well as answering the questions on the booking form you can request vendor documentation to be uploaded that then become part of the pitch or concession application.

This mechanism can be used to collect insurance certificates, operating licences, product photos, workplace health and safety certificates or anything else you need from the vendor before allowing them to operate at your event. Instead of chasing a vendor to provide all the necessary documents for your on-boarding process, with a Coconut Tickets booking form you can collect all the documents when the vendor makes his pitch application (or concession application).

You can either create your booking form during the creation of your new event, or you can accept the default booking form at that stage and then add to that booking form from the event admin area.

In event admin an empty booking form will look like the screenshot below.

Then we can add more questions to the booking form by clicking "Add Question". A new empty booking form question will then open as per the screenshot below.

To collect more than one certificate we would choose an answer format of "Multiple document". This allows more than one document to be collected for this question. A document is expected to be a scanned image or a PDF. Our certificate question could look like this in the popup.

Then we might want to collect photo images of the products that this stall has for sale. This time we want to restrict the file uploads to only images and allow more than one so we would use the "Multiple image" question. The product image question would look like the screenshot below.

To complete our example vendor pitch booking form we might add more questions like this:

• What products to you sell? Defined as a text answer that the vendor can type his answer into.
• Your business name. Another text answer.
• Insurance documents. Defined as a "Multiple document" answer in case there is more than one.
• Photo of your stall. Defined as a "single image" question because we only want their best photo.

With this complete, all the questions together in the booking form builder will look like this screenshot below.

When a vendor comes to your website to buy a pitch he will first see the pitch quantity selection page. This page is different depending on the pitch type and allows the vendor to say which pitch he wants or how big a pitch he requires. Then the next page the vendor will see is the booking form that we have just created. When he first sees the booking form, and it is empty, then it would look like the screenshot here.

Notice that Coconut Tickets has automatically added 3 fields to the booking form: name, email and phone number. These are mandatory fields for each online purchase.

When the vendor uploads documents and photos they are automatically displayed on the booking form. For example, see the screenshot below when "Bob Burgers" uploads his product photos.

Next, when "Bob Burgers" uploads his insurance certificate as a PDF document then this is previewed by displaying the document icon with the name of the file underneath to give feedback that the right document has been uploaded.

With all the documents attached the vendor can complete submit his pitch application.

As the event manager, with the pitch sales complete, we can now look at all the pitch applications that were made and inspect the documents and photos that the vendor's submitted. To do that we can return to the Dashboard, find the "Booking" main menu and select the "Manage bookings" option. We can then use the search filters to find the bookings we are interested in. The vendor pitch booking from "Bob Burger" can be seen in the booking manager screenshot here.

Then when we click on the link which is the number of the booking in the left hand "Booking#" column then all the details of this vendor booking will be displayed in a popup. Here below is a section of Bob's booking.

You can click on any of the icons or images to view the document (or image) in more detail in it's own browser tab. From there the document can be read, printed or downloaded as necessary.

At this point you would have the information to know whether "Bob Burgers" has provided all the documentation necessary and whether they can be accepted as a vendor at your event.

This concludes the tutorial. You should now have seen examples of how to save time and emails by including document and photo uploads in your vendor pitch booking forms.

For more information on selling pitches or concessions please see Selling vendor pitches online with Coconut Tickets

For more information on bidding for pitches or concessions please see Bidding for event pitches on Coconut Tickets

To understand more about the benefits of selling pitches and concessions online see 12 Benefits of selling vendor pitches and concessions online