What's new in Elevent

Link is new, one-click, frictionless way for customers to checkout and save their payment info. It's now enabled on all your accounts--but you might need to register and verify your website domain if you embed Elevent widgets on your website.

There are no additional costs to you.

What is Link Anyway?

Link is, essentially, a super-easy way for customers to auto-fill their payment card info, even if they don't have a saved card in Elevent. Once a customer has used Link once on any of the hundreds of thousands of business that support it, their card is saved for future verified use.

On your site or goelevent.com, they will be able to autofill their payment info just using their email address. Link is available to most people and is easier to use than most browser extensions, password managers, and bank-issued tools.

Link can subtly boost your online sales in pretty significant ways, including:

• Raise conversion rates by over 7% (There's solid data to support this)
• Speed up checkout by up to 6 seconds
• It's more secure--when customers use Link for the first time on your site or a new device, they receive an SMS with a one-time code to verify their identity

What Does the Customer See?

If Link can be used, when the customer is checking out, they'll see a link button where the card number is typically entered.

Any Link-known payment methods that are saved to that email address are offered up. Any additional verification or security measures are handled by Link to ensure the customer has the rights to these payment methods.

Often this is just a single button click--to use the default payment method. Once that's done, Link enters all the card info into the Elevent checkout form--even the security code.

That's it. Elevent will remember the card if the customer checks the box -- Link only prompts the customer when they aren't already using an Elevent-saved payment method.

Registering Your Website Domain

If you don't see the Link prompt on your own website, you probably need to register and verify your domain(s). This is the same process you would use to verify for Apple Pay and Google Pay.

If you are using your own Stripe account, you can register your domain here.

Learn more about Link here. This Stripe doc will show you how.

We have this great Customer Details page where you can really piece together all that a Customer is and does. Search someone up in the Back Office and there is nearly everything Elevent could know about them--what they bought, what they experienced, how much they've contributed, and what info they've shared.

Sometimes you might want to quickly add a single customer to an allocation while you look at them. Perhaps their activity qualifies them for some special VIP benefits or there was a customer service issue and you want to give them access to restricted seats.

Now you can quickly add that customer to an allocation or two without going to the Allocations pages in the main menu. In the Customer Snapshot on the top right, press the Add link next to Private Allocations.

Choose the private allocation to add them to and, at next login or visit, they'll have access to everything that private allocation.

Printing badges, labels, and wristbands--let's face it--it's a huge pain in the ribs. It's costly, time-consuming, and not exactly Earth-friendly. It's not-so-good to have a schedule of fantastic events on a boiling, lava-engorged flameball where no human life can exist. But I digress.

Digital credentials are the future--at least a part of the future. But it's early days yet--tangible items still have major souvenir and peer-marketing value, so they aren't going away entirely. Probably ever. Plus, a large proportion of your audience isn't ready to have their pass or ticket package on their smartphone.

2024 is the year of easy-peasy end-user delivery in Elevent. This is the first of several new features aligned with the idea of paper/plasticlessness. It's incredibly easy to enable; less easy to educate your audience that this is possible and a darn good idea.

For any passes or ticket package credentials you make available online, users see this when they log into their account (embedded on your website or on goelevent.com):

They press the View button and, voilà, there it is.

Learn how to enable/disable digital credentials here.

Link to a help article for end-users here.

As I said earlier, this is just one new method to get credentials in people's hands. If you click on the link above, you'll get a sneak preview into what exciting new method is on the horizon.

One of the appeals of Elevent's embedded widgets is they can be embedded anywhere--in any kind of website, all without psuedo-embeds or an iframe that jankily embeds one website into another.

That means not only can you natively embed the entire purchase process on your own website, but you can allow others to sell some or all of your items at other sales outlets or locations.

While there are security measures preventing unauthorized parties from selling your stuff for you, with increased demand comes increased exploitation.

We've added an additional security layer to actively prevent embedded widgets from functioning on websites you don't authorize.

On your Account Settings page, you'll see a new Widget Settings section--and in there you'll see the new Domain Whitelist.

Learn more about the wild and wonderful world of global Account Settings here.

Some locations have multiple auditoriums or other venues behind a single gated point of entry. Having the person/people gatekeeping switching between showtimes to scan can be tedious--especially when you get busy.

Since Elevent can scan credentials that could be used to get into multiple shows, scanning from a chokepoint like this is trickier than with a tickets-only system. But we've got it sorted.

If you've had a chance to get familiar with the new look & feel of Entry, one of the first things you might notice is the button on the top left.

For tablet and other widescreen displays, agents start off scanning all showtimes by default. They can still scan for a single show by pressing it. Mobile/smartphone users will either press the Scan All Showtimes button or choose a single show.

Then let scanning commence (list mode doesn't work here--that'd be one unmanageable list).

Tickets are always to a single showtime, so they scan normally.

Pass and ticket package credentials have some thinking to do. If they present a credential that can only be scanned into a single upcoming showtime, the system is smart enough to punch them into whatever showtime that is.

However, if there are multiple showtimes that the credential-bearer could get in to see, the agent will hear a different sound and choose which one for now.

Scan All Showtimes is supported in Entry on all size devices and in the Elevent At The Door iOS app.

Learn how to bring your chokepoints in check here.

Improvements and new features galore. Well…it's not that big of an update, so semi-galore.

• Updated the default Event List template to sort chronologically out of the box.
• Added some sample code to the Event List template to show how to filter it to show events from specific festival/season/series. Uncomment it to use it.

To take advantage of these 2 changes, re-import the FacetWP Event List Template from the Plugin Installation Guide

• Fixed a bug where taxonomies/categories wouldn't always update with auto-sync
• Added an option to automatically show a date range for events on an event grid when there are showtimes on more than 3 dates--using the new [elevent_promo_event_date] shortcode
• On the main ticketing shortcode, [elevent_showtime_list], in the default tabbed view, if a showtime spans multiple days, instead of showing a start date and time, the tabs will show a date range. This is handy for multi-day events.
• Remove the 2-digit year from the [elevent_showtime_list] tabs in the default view; now only month and day show.
• Fixed a bug that threw warnings on plugin installation (rogue leading space characters in 2 files)
• Added some CSS classes to enable easier and more effective styling and control on the event calendar and legend. Now you can customize the colors for the legend values and the background color they display on the calendar. (e.g., class "key out" for the sold out color)
• Updated the language in the calendar legend to more accurately describe what each state means.

• Fixed it so the Buy Tickets button on a sub-event will still display on child events when they are the only child event associated with a parent event.
• Added the ability to rename the header of the Showtimes List block (the main ticketing block) to the Elementor "Elevent Showtimes" Block
• Added support to import over 50 showtimes for a single event
• Fixed a behavior where updates to the festival/season/series taxonomy appeared to save but did not actually save. Updating the custom fields ACF file is required to receive this fix.

We're always looking for ways to make walk-up transactions speedier and more efficient. Even the act of pressing a print button can add seconds to each sale--and seconds add up.

As you might know, in the Elevent Box Office you can print both tickets and receipts. You can print tickets and receipts on a ticket printer. You can print tickets and receipts on a receipt printer. You can print tickets on a ticket printer and receipts on a receipt printer. You can eat them in a box. You can eat them with a fox.

No matter how you print, now you can enable auto-printing in your box office printer settings.

When enabled, agents won't need to push the print button after an order; tickets and/or receipts will automatically print each and every time.

Learn more about the thrilling world of ticket and receipt printer configuration here.

Introducing the initial set of Elevent Elementor blocks - drag, drop, & configurable blocks you can include on page and post templates, headers, and footers.

Just search for "Elevent" in the Elementor block panel and see what's available (A lot more show up on those event-specific post templates)

Want to add a whole mini-menu for all Elevent account login and customer account management? Just drag that block into your site header. Done.

Blocks are great--not only are they easier than shortcodes to find and add, they offer more customization on each page or post for custom text or style tweaks. Stay tuned for more like this.

Not an Elementor user? That's okay--we have a matching library of Gutenberg blocks in the works. You'll already see a few have started to trickle in.

Also in this update:

• Some base CSS changes to make styling easier and nicer out of the box
• Event grid shortcode now has an option for having the results be listed separated by commas, or as a date range assuming 4+ dates.
• Changed the way some date labels get marked up so they are more styleable
• Added the elevent_promo_event_date shortcode. When added to a listing, grid, or loop of events (e.g. Event Grid), it will show the comma-separated date(s) when the events take place. It will automatically flex to a date range when there are more than 3 dates for a single event.
• Bug fixes

Even if your subscription to Ticketing News Now! has lapsed, you've probably heard something about possible legislation to make ticket pricing more transparent to buyers. The "drip" or "junk" fees, as some call them, that inflate the real cost of tickets to consumers has raised a lot of eyebrows recently.

While we don't know what the legal landscape will look like, state to state, country to country, we've given you the option to display all-in pricing on some or all of your shows.

With all-in pricing, the true amount the customer will spend--inclusive of fees and taxes--displays before they add tickets to their cart.

Then, at checkout, they'll see how that all-in ticket pricing breaks out (and how much or little you, our heroic ticket seller, actually earn for the sale of each ticket.

Be circumspect when opting for all-in pricing; while your heart may be in the right place, consumer behaviors being what they are, you might unwittingly make your tickets look more expensive than they are compared to other offerings. All-in pricing may be the future--and hopefully so--as long as there's a level playing field.

Learn how to get transparent here.

We've struck a partnership and integration with NBC Universal and Fandango--to make it easy to show off your film screenings and sell tickets through Fandango, movietickets.com, Flixster, and other Fandango properties.

It's a great way to generate more ticket sales and grow your audience on other popular cinema destinations. This applies only to cinema screenings and only in the United States, I'm afraid.

It's fairly straightforward, in the end. You just:

1. Sign up. Fill out this acknowledgement and this sign-up form.
2. Create one or more Fandango tickets

1. Add Fandango tickets to showtimes and put them on sale.

We're giving it away for free for the first year, then we'll discount it to just $25/month per location after that (for a limited time).

You can learn all about selling through Fandango here.