What's new in Elevent

Some recently improved this-n-thats in the whoozitwhatzits:

• Merchandise and Concessions items are now included as line items in order confirmation emails
• Updated the select field when selecting products on custom order field setup
• Added Brand to the data returned in OnTransactionComplete widget event. Now you can communicate which brand items were purchased from to services like Google Analytics and Facebook, or divert users to a custom landing page after purchase.
• The Event by Reporting Date report now displays showtimes with no sales
• Added stricter enforcement to the one membership per user restriction on goelevent.com
• Several significant speed optimizations and tuning, especially on the box office home screen and customer search

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.

The Elevent API has been redone, really. The driving force behind this update is to give us more leeway to provide a greater amount of data and detail without impacting what's most important--the speed and efficiency of transactions.

The first thing to know is that your existing integrations are safe. The API is backward compatible--all pre-existing endpoints and responses still function and the URL and addresses are the same. Phew. So there's nothing you have to do.

But there is more you can do, if you are so inclined--including:

• Retrieve custom order field data--custom info you gather from buyers
• Retrieve venues and venue information
• Retrieve row & seat on tickets if you are doing Reserved Seating
• Retrieve the VenueID on Get Showtimes results
• Retrieve customer status on Get Customers results--to see if customers are active or otherwise
• See price and description on all Get Products results
• Get a deeplink to the customer details page in Get Customers results
• Added some bits to donation orders to indicate if they are round-up or automated donations
• Return General Ledger codes on Get Products calls
• Retrieve price and description on Get Products calls
• Added which brand(s) are associated with all the tickets in Get Showtimes calls
• Added ShowtimeStartDateTime, ShowtimeEndDateTime, and ActivationDateTime ISO 8601 DateTime properties to Get Showtimes calls from the External Web API

Revisit the tech specs of the Elevent API 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.

Creating films can be tedious work--there are a lot of bits of information and, in the film exhibition world, you have more rotation in your programming than live events.

We've got you covered.

Now you can create films with rich content in a matter of seconds; when you create an event, you can skip the typing and import info from TMDB, and online film database.

Glance to the right side when you create a new event. Just enter the name of a film, and perhaps a release date to limit the matches.

Select your film and your event is all set. You can customize any and all info and the images after the TMDB import.

To learn more, here's the haps.

Just to keep things spicy, we have not one but 2 apps you can use to gatekeep and check the audience in at the point of entry.

• Entry, the web app that works on all devices (but doesn't work with a smartphone camera)
• Elevent At The Door, the iOS app that works with camera (but doesn't work on Android devices)

Until now, they didn't really get along. Something was taken out of context about who was taking whose job, then Box Office got involved, it was a lot of drama.

Anyways, long story short, they made up. Now you can easily access and download Elevent At The Door on our iOS device from the Entry landing page.

We've added visual queues to the Showtime Details page to make it clear which tickets are passes and ticket packages.

It's a small but helpful tweak to add clarity when things get complex.

How do you get do the Showtime Details page? Why, the event calendar of course!

Before, when you clean up your workspace or start a new season and archive tickets, the data associated with those tickets wouldn't automatically keep showing up in some reports. We're bringing some of that back.

Retroactively, the sales and check-in activity from those archived tickets will remain present in all Sales and Redemption reports automatically.

By the way, if you aren't saving your favorite reports for easy access, you should consider it.

Member-restricted discounts are one of the most used and appreciated features--they are an easy and robust way to give certain members certain pricing benefits.

So you know what I'm talking about, this is when you create a discount--some $ or % off the price of a ticket, pass, whatever else--that only members can get. You just choose which tiers of members get the discount or free things and off you go.

Most of the time, you're also adding another restriction to these auto-applying discounts--and those restrictions might be intended to last the life of that specific membership. For instance, you might give each member 10 tickets at 50% off for the whole year of their membership--but no more than that.

Now, without doing anything manually, when that member renews or upgrades, they'll get a new lease on life. In our example above, they'll get a reset on the 10 discounted tickets over the life of their new membership.

There's nothing you need to do to take advantage--this is how it works from now on.

Learn more about member discounts here.