Selling Out and Waitlists

You have a number of options for managing your event capacity, and closing sales when the event is full.

Manually Closing Registration

To manually mark a fee as sold out, go to the fee configuration and check off Sold out. The fee will continue to show in the registration options, but will clearly be marked as sold out.

To simply close registration without indicating that it is sold out, you can deactivate the fee prices by doing one of:

• set the price to inactive
• set the price to admins only
• give the price a close date in the past

To cancel registration for other reasons, you can go to either the fee or the event and set its status to expired. It will not accept registrations after that, and will no longer appear in activity and fee indexes. To re-activate, set the status back to published.

If the event was set up for automatic capacity management but still has tickets for sale, you can go to the ticketing screen and withdraw the remaining active tickets from circulation.

Automatically Selling Out

If you use GA ticketing or special ticketing, your events and fees will automatically sell out when their ticket inventory has been exhausted.

Note that:

• tickets that have been held for purchase in someone's cart may eventually be released if the sale does not go through
• cancelled tickets can be returned to circulation
• tickets can be held back from sale and released at a later date
• additional tickets can be generated and offered for sale

so the "sold-out" designation is not absolute.

Nevertheless, it is simple, in principle, to control your event capacity by only offering a limited number of tickets for sale:

• set the fee ticketing method to GA (general admission)
• under the ticketing tab, release a fixed number of tickets for sale

The fee will automatically switch to sold-out status when there are no more tickets available for purchase.

Wait Lists

The registration system supports automated wait lists, which work as follows:

• if an event is sold out, it will offer a waitlist registration instead
• this generates a pseudo-ticket that goes onto the roster with a waitlist status
• at a later time if you decide you can handle the extra capacity, you can accept the waitlist registrations onto your roster, and bill them appropriately

To enable this feature, check off Enable waitlist when sold out in the fee configuration.

You can see your waitlist registrations in your regular roster. There is also a button to go to your waitlist tools to manage them.

On the main waitlist there are accept/reject buttons. If you reject the waitlist registration, the registration will switch to canceled status, and join other canceled registrations in the roster. (You can always find it again by included canceled registrations in your roster.)

If you accept the waitlist registration, you will be taken to a screen to process the registration. The process is as follows:

1. select the waitlist registrations that you will be accepting, by checking them off (typically there is one, but there may be a whole waitlist bundle)
2. select the price points you will be charging (waitlist registrations are often processed after normal pricing windows have closed)
3. decide whether you are invoicing now or not
4. decide whether to confirm the registrations now, or wait for payment
5. decide whether to email the usual confirmations and invoices to the registrant now, or whether you will deal with those communications manually

If the registrant is a user or member, they can log in to access their account statement and pay any outstanding invoices by credit card. Alternatively you can arrange payment by phone, or take care of it at the registration desk at the event itself.

Expanding Event Capacity

If your event sells out and you increase capacity, it is a simple matter to go to your ticketing screen and issue new tickets.

If you have a waitlist, however, it is best to take care of that first. Otherwise you might find that your new tickets get snapped up by fresh registrants before your waitlist requests can be processed.

After you have processed your waitlist requests, you can then add any additional tickets that space allows for.

If it was an activity that sold out, and you do not have a waitlist, then those who missed out on the activity while it was sold out may want to return and add the activity to their registration package. See the article on Revising Registrations for guidance.