What's new in Elevent

Version 1.4 of our Elevent Event Ticketing WordPress plugin makes the website integration far more hands-off.

Brands

Last year, we introduced brands as a way to group your products into different brands--the way customers experience these grouped-up concepts, how they report, and how you manage them in the Back Office.

Now, Brands integrate into your WordPress website. The major benefit? Have different parts of your website display events from different brands in totally different places without touching your website.

For example: You might have a year-round season and a special festival one month. You could consider those 2 different brands in Elevent.

On your website, you can feature your year-round season front and center--including or excluding the festival. You could also have a dedicated page for just the festival, where the only events that display are festival-branded events.

The festival/season/series taxonomy in WordPress remains--that's one you can always use within WordPress to group events together. If you want it to automatically categorize event groupings from what you set up in Elevent, brands is the answer.

Elevent event blocks and shortcodes, any event grid or listing you have, sliders, and carousels can all filter events/showtimes by brand.

You can even specify a brand in an URL to prefilter a general calendar to one brand.

Featured Images Update Automatically

Before, when the WordPress site first synced new events, it would import whatever first featured image was found. If the image changed in Elevent, you'd have to update in WordPress separately.

We did this to prevent multiple copies of images from cluttering up your media library and storage.

Now, if a different event featured image is detected from Elevent, those images will update themselves in WordPress automatically.

Hide Legend Option on Showtime List

The Showtime List block or shortcode is the real ticketing widget on event landing pages. By default, showtime buttons are color-coded to show which are sold out, members-only, etc.

It's now possible to hide that legend entirely if it's not helpful.

Some assorted bugs were also fixed, including:

• The Elementor Calendar block wasn't displaying
• The venue name is now hidden when all showtimes at that venue are filtered out
• Fixed a bug where events were set to pending when they were just put off-sale and re-synced based on UTC time

Man, refunds in Elevent are powerful. Potentially over-engineered. You can refund a part of any one of the taxes, fees, or prices on a thing that was part of an order while keeping the books in sync.

With great power comes great potential for confusion.

The most common thing an agent wants to do when refunding is:

1. Refund all money to the original payment method
2. Cancel everything in the order so the inventory is returned and the customer can't use it

That scenario has always been a click or two and off ya go.

Where agents could get confused is when doing a partial refund. The way it had worked--the agent would deselect the items so they wouldn't be refunded. Make any further adjustments, and then submit the refund.

It wasn't so intuitive for staff to deselect items that shouldn't be refunded. So we introduced a button to switch it around.

Now, staff can easily deselect everything that was going to be refunded--and select what will to refund.

We also added an all/none toggle to cancel tickets. In case you ever need to refund many tickets but allow the customer to continue to use them. Or conversely, keep the money but render the tickets unusable.

Similarly, we added all/none toggles to refund all taxes or service charges.

Revisit the Box Office agent refund guide if you dare.

Enormous orders can be cumbersome for customers--especially where tickets are involved. Until we reach that day when the print-at-home, PDF in an email of tickets is no longer a thing, 454 tickets in a single order is just asking for trouble.

However, other types of products are less cumbersome. As long as your sales channel maxes allow it, we've increased the max per order for all non-tickets to 50. Tickets remain at that 25-per-showtime limit, pending further review.

You can loosen the reins in your sales channel(s).

When a customer with multiple ticket packages is using multiple packages at once to get tickets, we squashed some bugs to more strictly enforce all of the max rules that might be in effect.

This was a new-ish scenario when we replaced the more guided 'use-this-one-ticket-package-now' flow with the more open, 'use-all-ticket-packages-and-buy-tickets-at-the-same-time' flow.

This is why AI can't write our updates.

A Delivery Method is simply how you deliver what you sold to the customer. We do a lot of digital delivery in the ticketing world, so it might not be something you ever thought about.

You can also sell tangible goods--like merchandise and concessions--alongside tickets and everything else. We expanded delivery methods to allow different delivery methods to be chosen for each type of product in the cart.

This is one of those seemingly simple changes that has a ripple effect throughout the system. It affects online sales, walk-up/phone sales, reporting, configuration, and revenue.

Delivery Methods are set up in each sales channel you manage. Most orgs keep it to Web and Box Office, but you can make your own.

Now, you can add/remove products for delivery method you offer.

So if you only want to offer Fedex 2-day shipping for merch and membership welcome packages, no problem.

Furthermore, each product can set its own Delivery Method Fee for each delivery option. If FedEx 2-day shipping is free for membership welcome packages but costs $8 for merch, set that here.

Online (including embedded widgets) and the Box Office point of sale will offer these options in a clear, concise way.

We made the important decision not to offer the user a choice for each and every line item in the cart. It's tedious and super-frictiony to make the user choose a delivery method for each set of tickets or item in the cart. All tickets are delivered one way, all merch another, all memberships another way, etc.

Learn more about setting up Delivery Methods in sales channels here.

Prior to this change, when you added new Staff users from the Back Office, they wouldn't receive an email alerting them they had a new Elevent account. New users wouldn't know they had an Elevent staff-level login until someone from the organization told them.

Now, right when new users are added, they'll receive an email letting them know they've been added.

They'll receive a temporary password and will need to set a new one.

Learn the ins & outs of managing staff here.

This improvement applies to organizations that have adopted Elevent's mobile wallet tickets. Interested in adding mobile wallet tickets and credentials to your arsenal? Chat with us from the Back Office and we'll show you what to do.

When customers purchase tickets online (either embedded in your website or from goelevent.com), they are prompted to add their tickets to their Apple or Google mobile wallets. They press a button after their purchase.

At the same time, we also allow you to add a substantial amount of other custom messaging and content to the order complete screen. You can do this from Account -> Settings.

This custom content can get rather lengthy. In some cases it pushed the mobile ticket button down and out of sight. After some light testing, we reordered how these elements display; the mobile ticket button will display above your custom info to help buyers get their tickets more easily.

Get on the mobile wallet tickets & credentials train here.

If you sell a lot of merchandise in Elevent and your individual item SKUs have a numbering convention that's meaningful to you, it can prove very useful.

For instance, if all of your item SKUs (those unique barcode/QR codes on your products) of a certain kind of item all start with "12345", not only can you unlock the locks on many traveler's luggage, now you can also filter to all merch item variants with those numbers in their SKUs.

Make sure you have Show Variants checked so you can really see what you're doing.

Now you can check off all of these item variations, each with their own unique SKU, and bulk assign them to a group, brand, export them, or push them into Airtable.

While we're talking merch--we also made the tax status of merch "taxable" when you first create new merch items. Unlike intangible items like tickets, merch is usually subject to sales tax.

You'll find the Merchandise Manager tool here.

If you haven't taken a look at our new automated producer subscription system, you should check it out. It's a great way to save time and effort keeping bookers, producers, promoters, renters, and other external folks regularly updated on ticket sales.

For longer show runs, it was pretty tedious adding each scheduled showtime one at a time. Struggle no longer--now you can add all showtimes at once for any event to one or more subscribers.

Learn more about creating and managing producer subscriptions here.

We've made some major improvements to the API's data refreshing speed--new info is now made available in the API about twice as quickly.

We'll continue to optimize this new pattern to make this API data fresher and fresher for integrated systems.

Also, we added a new field when getting Membership products: [TaxDeductibleAmount].

This field returns the dollar amount of a membership considered tax-deductible. It's useful to get an Elevent-controlled value in CRMs and email systems to have that value available for tax receipts and supporter communication.