What's new in Elevent

For tech nerds and 3rd party integrators

For CRMs and other systems that integrate to Elevent via our full API, it was difficult to accurately interpret the life of items when some advanced post-transaction activity occurred. We're talking about those more occasional events such as:

• Gifts
• Transfers
• Orders re-associated from one buyer to another
• Imported items

To help external systems piece together the whole story, we've added a Purchaser object and OwnershipType to the API customer responses.

For instance, if a customer bought a "Secondary" pass, they might see this bit of data underneath their customer node:

The Purchaser node makes it clear who the original purchaser was (And who actually spent money). This makes it possible to correctly construct a history where one person bought things and other people ended up with the custody of those items--and the possible relationships between the two.

OwnershipType tells you what happened--was this a first-party "Purchase", as in the example above, or was it Gifted, Transfererd, Imported, or something else.

You will not see Purchaser or OwnershipType on donations, concessions, or merchandise since they have a simpler post-purchase lifespan.

These new nodes are not included in the API endpoint for Anonymous Orders because…well, they're anonymous. We don't know. And neither should you.

To explore the Elevent API Docs, knock yourself out here.

Vouchers are a great and powerful tool in Elevent--awesome for highly flexible ways to give customers the right to use or share items-to-be. But with that flexibility can come challenges making it easy for customers to understand and use them.

On goelevent.com, where we have more control, we've always been able to do an effective job recognizing logged-in users, seeing if they have remaining vouchers, and prompting them at checkout to use them by pressing a button or two. This has been a very successful and sleek customer process.

That's pretty cool what's happening there. Elevent detects:

• If someone is logged in
• If they have any unused vouchers
• What's in their cart
• If any of their unused vouchers could be used right now based on what's in their cart

Then it personalizes the experience to let them mash a couple of buttons to turn those paid tickets into voucher usages. Usings. Voucher redemptions. Whatever.

When the checkout process is embedded into your own website, it's a bit trickier. Elevent has limited control over your website and has less guaranteed real estate to work with.

In the past, we didn't detect if the customer had vouchers they could use--they would need to know their voucher numbers and enter them in like this:

So that wasn't setting the world aflame for frictionless checkout. Now, even in those embedded widgets on your own website, we'll detect the customer (if logged in), assess whether they have vouchers they could use based on what's in their cart, and give them the option to apply them without typing anything in.

So that's a whole lot easier.

We'll retain that text box where users can enter vouchers they have--it's still super useful for those customers who received vouchers from other people. But this should cut into a large chunk of voucher usage and weed out a few customers who got lost along the way.

Learn more about how customers use voucher bundles here.

We have released Version 5.0 of Elevent. This major release contains a collection of some large new features we'll be detailing in the coming weeks and months.

• Reserved/Assigned Seating 2.0: An entire overhaul of Reserved Seating with some of the best customer-facing interactivity, a more interactive seat selection process, with venues and seat plans that are more spatially representative and customizable to your specific venues
• New, expanded API optimized for more in-depth CRM integrations. And on that note…
• Elevent for Salesforce 2.0 (now in security review, coming to an org near you)
• eWallet support for tickets: Apple and Android
• The seedlings for an updated Back Office UI

A lot of this list are full new subsystems, not just features. We'll be introducing them in more detail on their own.

When you login for the first time today, you'll likely notice the navbar at the top and the main menu in Elevent Back Office look different.

We've opted for a darker, more high-contrast design and we've made the styling more consistent throughout.

On the main menu, we've made room to un-bury some hard to miss functions like venues, sales channels, credentials, and widgets so they're harder to miss.

This is just a start--we'll be working our way down into some of the detail pages of the Back Office to make them more intuitive and organized. Years of adding new features has rendered many of these pages (and there are a lot of them) a bit haphazard in form and function.

While it's common to have service charges that apply across all of your showtimes, there are situations where a certain segment of your showtimes have a different set of service charges. This may be when a certain venue collects a restoration fee, when you rent out your own venue, or just have a different service charge policy for a different series or group of events.

You can override service charges for an individual showtime from the Quick Links you see from the Showtime Details page in the Back Office.

To help simplify configuration and management of these non-standard showtimes, when you copy one showtime to create additional showtimes just like it, the custom service charges for that showtime will also copy over.

Copying Showtimes is easy and can save you tons of time. Learn more about how to copy showtimes here.

We're always making performance improvements and squashing bugs. Here are a few recent ones you are more likely to notice:

• Fixed a bug where showtimes without allocation templates weren't visible on the Showtime Detail page
• Fixed a bug to correct the recurring timeframe for automatically recurring donations
• Fixed a bug related to time zones & UTC times on All Showtime scan counts in the Entry app
• Fixed a bug affecting the submission of weekly grosses to SWIFT when doing an individual showtime override
• Fixed a bug related to how required checkbox custom order fields work in embedded widgets
• The Showtime by Reporting Date Excel export now includes the showtime column
• Improved the messaging in the edge cases where a box office agent is doing an exchange and the ticket expiration timer expires before the exchange is completed
• Resolved an issue where it was possible to retain secondary members when a member downgrades from a sharable membership to an individual membership
• Will now prevent a gift membership from being redeemable while the recipient already has an active membership

The Slack Daily Summary is a great way to keep the pulse of your daily sales activity on any device. I don't know about you, but they're part of my morning routine: glance at the daily slack, make sure yesterday's sales look in line with what I'd expect.

Concessions & Merchandise were added after we created this Slack integration. So we've gone back and added concessions & merch info to this daily update alongside all the other product lines. If you don't see it, make sure to press "Show more" in Slack--Slack auto-hides each post after a certain number of lines.

Visit this article to learn more about enabling the Slack integration.

We've removed some old features and limited some data-intensive history to keep things sprightly. Here's what's changed:

• We're no longer tracking Stripe payout, payment intent, and charge history past 12 months. You'll retain that history in your own Stripe account and you'll still have your own sales and transaction history in Elevent, but Elevent won't be able to tie to the 2 together for orders over a year old
• The old WordPress Export tool has been removed--it was only valuable before the existence of the WordPress plugin. Now your event schedule and ticketing is automatically populated, there's no need to export/import showtimes
• The new Entry UI is well out of beta. We've officially retired the old Entry screens.

When customers get reserved seating, we're showing the row & seat assignments in more places, including:

On the Order Complete screen when using embedded widgets:

In their email order confirmation:

These changes are part of the preamble to our new v2 Reserved Seating system. More on that anon.

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've been hard at work making Entry and Elevent At the Door even faster--over the past couple of months, you might notice it's decidedly speedier, especially when you have larger schedules and longer lists of patrons to admit.