June 1, 2010
“Ok, we’ve sold tickets. Now what?”
Ok, so you’ve sold tickets, your actors know their lines, and the squirrel suits are finished.
The doors are about to open. You’ve sold most of your seats ahead of time, but you’ll still be selling some tickets at the door. Time to pull out that iPhone and get rolling. Here’s one way this might work:
First off, you’ll switch from sales mode to door mode. Picking a performance is exactly the same — slide through the posters and pick a time.
From here, you’ll be able to either to quickly sell tickets as people come in…
…or you can mark patrons as “arrived” when they show up with their ticket info.
If you’re in a huge hurry and you don’t feel like looking up individual tickets, you can just tap the button for the ticket type and send people on their way.
If you do want to check people in individually, though, you can tap the “Collect” button to look up tickets by name, ticket number, or order number. With a single ticket, just click the checkbox to show that they’ve arrived. If you look up an order number, you’ll have the option to mark individual tickets.
But what if your iPhone died yesterday? What if your underground bunker of a theatre is left high and dry by AT&T? Well, there’s always paper. In fact, we’ll generate PDFs for you that list all of your ticket sales for easy crossing off at the door. And we’ll make a PDF for easily tracking sales at the door. Say, something like this:
Would that process work for you, or should we make some adjustments?
Damon Runnals says at
June 2, 2010 at 8:40 amThis is looking fantastic!
Love the app feel.
1 question: how do reservations work? I’m out with a friend they want to reserve tix cause the show is hot but they don’t want to pay until they show up the night of the show.
Also I might have missed it but what about comps? Is the price per ticket per show locked in? Or is the discount stuff from the first build you were doing still applicable?
Sent from my iPhone.
Jesse says at
June 2, 2010 at 12:54 pmWe haven’t worked through a full design for reservations, but I’m thinking we could just have a “Reserve” button alongside the “Sell” button. Would that do the trick?
A comped ticket would be a type of discount, I think. We’ll definitely want to include those at some point. Would the iPhone app still be worthwhile for you if we didn’t support discounts right away, or would that be a strict requirement?
Damon Runnals says at
June 2, 2010 at 4:09 pmI think that would work great. The reserve button could mimic the sales button in capturing patron info but with no payment at that time.
We have little need for discounts as we don’t offer many. We really have only two types of tickets: $15 for a Fri or Sat show, and then all the others are “Pay what we are worth” where the audience just makes a reservation, sees the show, and then pays what they think it was worth in cash or check afterwards.
I think we would certainly use the app right away, and then adjust our model based on features in the future.
Damon
Shane says at
June 16, 2010 at 8:57 amHi guys. What can I say… amazing job on getting all this together.
Unfortunately for our venue, 70-80% of our bookings/sales are made online or by phone and paid for in advance with plastic.
I know it’s early days, but I’m afraid it would be too messy for us to move only the cash sales over to Chroma and keep our existing system going for everything else.
I’ll keep tabs on the Twitter feed… would love to adopt Chroma this as our complete ticketing solution in the not too distant future.
Wishing you continued success… keep the updates coming!
Once again, well done.
Chris says at
June 16, 2010 at 10:01 amHi Shane,
Totally understandable. Naturally we’ll be trying to add online sales quickly once we get things up and running in this simpler form.
One thing we’re playing with right now, based on feedback from Marni, is the idea of allowing tickets sold through *other* services to be accounted for in Chroma. It’s kind of a crazy idea, but I’m liking it more and more.
-Chris
Andy Dolph says at
July 2, 2010 at 12:57 pmthis is probably down the road, but, what if the Iphone could also scan one of those square funny looking barcodes on the receipt as a way of checking people in – if you want to know how many of the sold tickets were used (IE how many patrons physically entered the theater) it could be rather slow to have to put in an email address for each group that goes in… but if they have their receipt then it could just be scanned…
I know some venues are required to know how many people are physically in the theater, so if there’s an emergency they know if they’ve evacuated everyone….
Andy
Chris says at
July 2, 2010 at 1:00 pm@Andy Heh. Great minds…
Jem Page says at
July 21, 2010 at 8:45 pmIf you’re going down the iPhone route, it would be terrifically awesome if you could manage to integrate barcode scanning into the app.
That would make for supremely quick and efficient check in for individuals.
http://youtu.be/9_hFGsmx_6k
Jem Page says at
July 21, 2010 at 8:45 pmAlternatively, why not a QI image for each ticket?
Johan Söderberg says at
August 12, 2010 at 9:56 amYes barcodes would be great!
But then I must say it looks quite great already.
Looking forward to this going live!
But then of course all of Sweden “is left high and dry by AT&T” – we do however have the nation flooded with wifi, 3g and 4g nets.
Hope it will work on a local wifi and leave at&t out of it.
Chris says at
August 12, 2010 at 10:03 amAn update! Sean and I did some initial prototyping of a native iPhone app, and got pretty far. However, we realized the further we went that we didn’t really *need* a native app for this. We can do everything we want (at least for now) using HTML 5 in a mobile web site.
This has a ton of upsides, including the fact that the app will work on multiple devices, and we won’t have to deal with Apple approving our application, and we can make fixes and adjustments instantly.
Therefore, I’ve brought an amazing designer and coder Jordan Dobson on board to build the mobile application for Tixato:
http://dribbble.com/players/jordandobson
I’m excited about this. I think it’s going to be a great way to make Tixato mobile.