We have discount features added to our bug tracker, but if people could summarise what discount options they are looking for so we can look at them for Beta7.

Currently under discussion:

• Group Discounts
• Category Discounts
• Separate POS/Shop Discounts
• Per day discount
• Free Tickets/Pre Order Codes
• Changing ticket discount (POS)
• Smother Order Steps (Discounts at same time as selecting seats)
• Seasonal discounts...

Please reply to thread so I can add them here.

Thanks,
Chris

Adding a per day discount for events would be helpful (ie: most movie theaters have cheap days one day a week).

Hi Chris,

in adapting beta5 for my wife's amateur opera society, I've made the following changes to the discount system - maybe some of the concepts are useful for what you plan to do for beta7:

1: Add group discounts (there are several ways of thinking about this - the one we've used is 'every time you pay for x tickets, you get one free - e.g. in 11 tickets 1 is free, 22 2 are free, 33 3 are free etc).
2: Family ticket: For a particular show, they have a family ticket which is meant to be two adults and up to three children - this ticket is cheaper than buying the five tickets separately.
3: In the POS, allow changing the discount on individual seats of unpaid orders (we take a fair amount of telephone orders, and some times people are unsure of whether they want discount tickets or full price at the time of order, they only know that they want x tickets).
4: As you also suggest, we've got discounts that should only be accessible to the POS (free tickets for friends of the society e.g.).

BTW, I've also made a number of other changes for usability and functionality which has made the system more usable for us. Some of them are quite hacky, but I'm happy to explain what I've done if you're interested.

EDIT: One other thing that would be useful would be if you could select the discount after selecting the seats in POS, rather than before selecting the seats. That way, you can select all the seats for an order in one go, rather than risking somebody else picking half of the seats you intended to pick if you see what I mean?

Cheers,
Tom

Hello Tom,

Thank you for your time writing about your ideas and changes. We love people that are like to work on it as you did.
When you like we can include your changes into our next beta version.
You can send you whole package to niels[at]fusionticket[dot]com then i will check your changes.

thanks again
Niels

My suggestion goes a little way beyond the scope of discounts and encompasses ticket allocations and categories.

Current situation:
One can create a number of categories, each of which has a single price and a number of available tickets.
Various discounts can be applied to category prices (individually or globally?)

Proposal:
Have a mechanism to create one or more pools of tickets (a pool may represent different classes of seats, equivalent to current categories) - e.g. stalls, balcony, …
Create categories (for want of a better word), with the following properties:
- price
- pool from which it takes tickets
- number of tickets per transaction

There are a number of advantages to this, including more flexible ticketing options and a simpler, more streamlined UX for customers.

It would mean that you can create categories for different pricing points (adult, concessions, members). This is the same functionality to current discounts, but it means that the options can be presented on the event page, to be selected as a single step in the buying process.
e.g.
Step 1. "I'll have 2 adult and 3 child tickets"
rather than
Step 1 "I'll have 5 tickets"
Step 2 "One of those is for a child. One of those is for a child. One of those is for a child."
Imagine if they were buying for a school group!

It would mean that one could offer a 'family ticket' (say, 2 adults & 2 children) for a single fixed price. This is selected as a single item in the buying process. By doing it this way, the seats are taken from the same pool as individual tickets and capacity and seat allocation are all taken care of.

You would still have discounts that can be applied on top of all this (e.g. POS complementary tickets, online members discount), but this provides a more flexible base to work from.

There's more!
Thinking about the family ticket situation, there is a way to be really clever… It's actually something to do in addition to the above, rather than instead of it, but it would be the icing on the cake.

Create the concept of a meta-category – a category that draws on other categories.

Take the example of the family ticket above. You could set it up as a category like this:
Name: Family ticket
Cost: £35
Pool: A
# tickets: 4

One disadvantage to this is that it will not be clear on the individual tickets that two of them are for adults and two for children – each ticket could only state 'Family ticket'. Now consider the following setup:

Name: Adult
Cost: £15
Pool: A
# tickets: 1

Name: Child
Cost: £10
Pool: A
# tickets: 1

Name: Family ticket
Cost: £35
Source: Adult, x2
Source: Child, x2

So, with a meta-category, you can define an arbitrary number of category sources and quantities that go to make up this category.

Thus, buying a single family ticket would produce two adult tickets and two child tickets, the family ticket price would override the individual ticket prices and all tickets would be allocated from the same pool of seats.


There are probably many other use cases that could take advantage of this model, I've just focussed on a couple to keep things (relatively) simple.

Cheers,
Stephen

Subscriptions and Passes

I'm not sure if this falls directly into "discounts" or if there's a better way to handle it. My wife's theatre company offers what they call a "flex pass." This is kind of like a season subscription, but the purchaser doesn't have to choose the specific performance dates/times/seats at the time of purchase. It's a win-win for us and the patrons. We still get the revenue up front, the patrons get a discount over purchasing tickets for individual shows, and they don't have to commit to a specific performance date that's 6 months out.

We also offer preferred seating to flex pass holders. In our current ticketing system, we do this by creating a separate seat map for the first three rows.

There's a lot to consider, and I'm not sure how to handle all the parts:

1) How to sell flex passes? Maybe this is set up as an "event" and sold like general admission tickets. When the sale is completed/paid, the flex pass info (number of passes purchased, remaining "credits" per pass) is stored in some new fields in the patron record.

Or, alternately, when the flex pass sale is completed, the system generates "coupon codes" that the patron enters later when they are reserving seats for a specific performance.

2) How do flex pass holders reserve seats for a show? If the flex pass is represented as stored credits attached to the patron record, we could have an order handling that deducts credits rather than charging a credit card.

3) How to do preferred seating for flex pass holders? Perhaps a special ticket category that only appears if the patron is logged in and has flex pass credits in their account?

Totally open to ideas here. Perhaps there's a different way to think about flex passes that would make this easier to implement.

updated main thread... Alot to take in... I think alot needs to be decided between what would be more useful to everyone primarly then more specific setups.

More streamlined order proccess would benifit everyone.. that kind of thing.. any input as to what you would think of being most important.

Personaly, Discount Code, Order Proccess and Group discounts stick out as the primary points at the moment...

Any other input.

Thanks All so far for your ideas. very helpful

One more form of discounts that has not been explicitly stated: discount codes.

This would be added as a field on the Review Order page, allowing a user to enter a promotional code (e.g. received by flyer/email) for a discount.