About Timeslots
By not letting everyone in the Seatmap at the same time, but instead hand out timeslots, you can quickly handle a large number of visitors (and claim a virtual ‘sold out’ superfast), but spread out the seat selecting and payment.
Regular peak sale
At a peak sale moment, a large number of visitors can be on your website to buy tickets at once. If this number is too high for the capacity of the ticketing system, a waiting queue will be activated.
Although this is a fair "first come, first serve" solution, it can lead to long waiting times, and does often not lead to a positive visitor experience.
Visitor tag peak sale
In order to prevent high traffic loads on your website, you can opt to plan your peak sale in several phases. You can plan a pre-sale moment for friends or any other subgroup of visitors via a visitor tag. Each visitor tag can get a specific pre-sale date in the visitor tag dashboard module.
Time slot peak sale
With time slots, every visitor will have a personal moment to access the sale. In this situation you can spread the peak sale moment over an entire day, or two.
There are two phases in a time slot based peak sale:
Phase one: Acquiring a time slot
To obtain a time slot, a Visitor can apply for one on the website. A special button will trigger the time slot allocation process. The button shows up when you are logged on to your account, and is shown in the "welcome" part on the homepage, the "My account" pop-up menu (see below) and your "My account" start page. This button will become inactive when alle time slots have been handed out.
After requesting a time slot, you will immediately see the date and time when your personal pre-sale starts:
This process needs to be configured in Control Panel>Time slot based access and describes the start of the time slot period, and the increment between time slots. The time slots are allocated on a "first come, first serve" basis.
If multiple periods of time-slot requests are needed, just reconfigure the allocation process in between the periods.
- Handout starts: the date and time when you want to start showing the button to apply for a timeslot
- Timeslots available for visitor tags: If you only want to show the button to certain visitor tags, select them here
- First time slot: The date and time of the first time slot. This date/time gives the visitor access to the presale
- Last timeslot (optional): To limit the amount of timeslots handed out.
- Slots per hour: This option controls the increment of timeslots. 60 per hour means every new timeslot handed out will be 1 minute later than the previous one. The timeslots are rounded up to the next minute for the visitor.
- Window start & Window end: This option provides a daily window in which the time slots are generated. Use this if you don’t want time slots that are late in the night or too early in the morning. Once the “Window end” is reached, the next timeslot will start on the “Window start” of the next day.
Phase Two: Access to the Peak Sale with a Time Slot
Once a time slot has been acquired, it will show up in the Visitor account in the Dashboard:
You can edit, change and delete this time slot yourself if you feel the need to. You can also manually add a time slot to any account that hasn't got any.
Make sure you have your pre-sale group properly set-up. A time slot gives early access to all current pre-sale groups:
Your personal time slot is visible at several places on the website. It will show in the personal My Account pop-up, and also in the "welcome" part on home, once you are logged in:
Every event that is part of the pre-sale will show the personal time slot in place of the "tickets" button:
When the time slot is active, the visitor has access to the pre-sale and all events within the pre-sale group that are on sale. The time slot will not expire, and has no end-date or time. The visitor can access the pre-sale at any time or day after the time slot is active.
Access to time slot module from Dashboard homepage
On the dashboard homepage you can see the current status of the time slots handout. From there you can also directly access the Settings and the page where you can Remove time slots (see next paragraph).
Removing timeslots
In The visitor module, top right is a button named "Remove time slots". This feature enables you to remove all timeslots older then the defined date/time.
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