We are in the process of considering third party ticket sales.  We are aware that there isn't an exact set up for this PE for US or Canadian companies, but BB did share that they have clients in the US and in Canada that do third party ticket sales.

I am looking for information regarding how you decided to set it up, what the process has been like in recording and reporting the third party sales.  Has it been a very manual process that requires a lot of time and care?  Did you find a useful method?

 I would appreciate any insight or experience on approaching and implementing third party tickets sales.

Thank you very much,

Meaghan

Meaghan,

 When you find a solution please share it on the blog.  Our college is considering the same thing.

Thank you,

 Hi Meaghan,

I am the Box Office Manager for the Savannah College of Art and Design and we handle the ticket sales for the Savannah Film Festival, the Savannah Music Festival, Savannah Philharmonic, etc.

 Take a look at our website www.savannahboxoffice.com and let me know if you are interested in ticketing for outside organizations the way that we do.  If so, I'd be more than happy to talk with you about our process and how things work for us. 

Meaghan,

We consign an allotment of tickets to third party sellers, usually discount outlets.  We also consign tickets to some of the venues we rent, to sell through their box offices. 

For the discount outlets, we do not specify seat locations, so it's easy for me to lock (reserve) seats for their purposes. 

For the venues, it's a bit more labor intensive.  I typically sell seats to the outlet/venue while marking those selected seats on a paper seating chart.  Then I complete the sale using cash as the method of payment.  I then go back and double check my allocations to what is booked in the CRM.  On the same business day, I cancel the cash sale and use the option to lock seats, using a lock specified as Consignment.  These seats are password protected so only specific users can sell them.  It's also important to make sure your settings keep those locks from online sales.  When it comes time to reconcile, I sell the actual seats sold from the seats held under the Consignment lock.

 I hope this helps.  If anyone else has better business practices, please share.

 -Sue

 We are looking at doing third party consignment sales for museum admissions.  We have unique events for each day's admission, so this one gave me a bit of a struggle to find an adequate solution.  Here is what we are about to try:

 I create a Merchandise Item (with a printable voucher) for the agreed upon amount and values.  I also create a Coupon in the system which is redeemable for a 100% discount on our museum admission; the Merchandise Item's voucher has a bit of text in the upper left corner that matches the Coupon Description so our Associates use the proper codes.  So, in essence, we sell third-parties the vouchers which are then redeemed seamlessly by their clients without really knowing what happens in the backend.

I can then use the Coupon Utilization report to see how many consignment tickets were utilized/not utilized, and settle with our Accounting to move money from Deferred to Earned revenues.

We'll be rolling this out soon, so it hasn't been instituted yet.  Any thoughts?