BuyPlayTix Blog

Producers ask us all the time:  “Do customers want to pay the service charge on top of their donation or have it be deducted from their donation?”

So we added a feature that allows the customer to choose and you no longer have to play mind-reader!  

To turn on this feature, 

Go to Menu>Settings>Global Settings.  Click on the Donations Tab.  Check “Service Charge Customer Choice” at the bottom of the page.

To see the page in action, go to Menu>Production>Links>Donation Page

Click the icon to the right of the url address to view your donation page.

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The next time you login to BuyPlayTix you might be greeted with the following prompt.

What happens when you don’t upload a logo?

When your show gets shared on Facebook, people see this:

On the BuyPlayTix calendar:

On the front page:

Recently Stripe added "Dynamic Statement Descriptors". This means that I can now add a small bit of text to the credit card charges. It's only 15 characters, but hopefully it will be enough to jog patron's memory.

So now if they donate they'll see "Donation" on the statement. If they bought tickets to "Uncle Whizzy's Funtime Show", they'll see "Uncle Whizzys F" on it.

So sometimes you need to concede defeat. BuyPlayTix's website editor just never really worked as well as I'd hoped and it'll be removed in a future version of BuyPlayTix. But, replacing it is a much better embedded ticket widget and Wordpress integration.

New Ticket Widget

Listen I'll admit when I steal. artful.ly has a really cool ticket widget. It sits on your webpage and lets your patrons buy tickets without leaving your site. I took that idea and did one better. You can now embed a shopping cart on your website with ease, and it works great on mobile phones.

They click that buy button and the shopping cart tab expands to show the shopping cart. They want to add more tickets? They just click on the tab to hide it and shop away. You want to play with it? Here's a demo page to try.

You can find the new ticket widget by going to 'Productions' then click on 'Links'. The code you need is under 'Embed Code'. 

Wordpress

And if you use Wordpress as your blog hosting things have gotten even easier. Install the BuyPlayTix plugin and you'll get shortcodes and widgets to unobtrusively add ticketing, calendars, and donations to your website. 

BuyPlayTix Wordpress Plugin

Facebook Tickets Button

A lot of bugfix releases have come and gone. But with 5.06 I've added two new features.

Group Rates We had crazy combos, and discount codes, but what about the relatively simple group rate? Now they're hanging out on your production screen. Get to those discounts!

Logos I'll admit it. For a while I was afraid of logos. I think I've managed to get over my fear. Now you can go to your settings and add a logo for your theater company to be displayed on every sales page. You can also add a logo to specific productions from the productions page.

In combination with theming this is ridiculously powerful and something that I don't see other ticketing sites allowing.

What happened to 5.1? It was an emergency bug-fix. 5.2 is where the action is!

Look and Feel

One thing you may notice right off is that I've changed the look and feel of BuyPlayTix. My goal is to make it simpler and easier to find things. But if anything is hard for you to read please let me know.

'Add to mailing list' checkbox

  The 'add to mailing list' checkbox used to be listed after every single show. This made buying a ticket somewhat confusing. It's now in the first step of checking out, and patrons only have to check it once for the entire transaction.

Style Changes

When you go to one of your pages logged in you'll notice that the producer dashboard no longer shows up by default. There's now a button to click to make it show up. Once you do you'll notice the new 'Edit Style' button. This allows you to work on styles going from page to page in your website. You can also save your style as a named theme that you can re-use between productions and the global site. 

This also makes it easier for me to update the default templates, so hopefully they'll be seeing some love in the coming weeks.

Pick Your Price limits

Pick your Price the way it was initially implemented left a lot to be desired. You could use it, but could put caps on how high or low people could go. That's changed with this release. You can now choose a Minimum, Maximum, and the default value.

Accessibility

I feel ashamed this one took as long as it did. But we finally have the ability to make requests for accessible accommodation on the checkout page. 

When a user makes this request you'll see this icon next to the reservation - . Please let me know if it would useful to have this communicated in more detail. Would you like an email when the reservation is made? A nightly email of all requests two hours before show time? 

Scanning Tickets

If you have an Android tablet (and if you have an iPad I'd love to talk to you), there's now the ability to scan tickets from the box office using the camera in your tablet. 

BuyPlayTix 5.0 has only two new features. But they're huge!

Stripe Integration

All accounts now require a Stripe account. When you next login to BuyPlayTix you'll get a message at the top of your dashboard that will start you through the process. In my testing it takes less than 5 minutes to setup.

Stripe provides merchant accounts for websites (like PayPal, or authorize.net). Signup is a one page form and you'll need a check to provide your bank routing and account number.

Once setup you'll no longer have to deal with checks. Stripe deposits your money into your bank account 7 days after it clears. Which means you could be getting paid up to a week earlier than you were before.

Stripe has a fantastic accounting interface, and BuyPlayTix has direct linking from the Credit Card report to the actual transactions in the Stripe web interface.

Refunds

The other big feature are refunds! Now you can go to a reservation or pass and refund tickets. It's a big red button. You can't miss it.

Dashboard This is an update that you may have already noticed. I've added a dashboard to provide a starting point for most of BuyPlayTix's most common task. There's also an activity log that tracks what's done to your account. 

Notifications Notifications can be setup in 'Global Settings'. They let you get emails when your box office gets close to full (you decide what that means). And you can send to multiple email addresses so you can copy your Box Office manager.

Graphic Mail Integration Graphic Mail is the latest mailing list software we've integrated with. If you enter your credentials you'll automatically have your customers added to your email list when they buy a ticket (if they opt-in of course). And you can create custom mailing lists (people who bought a ticket to your last show, people tagged as actors, etc) and export them using the 'Export Contacts' functionality.

Man, where did those 6 versions of BuyPlayTix go? Mostly to bug-fixes unfortunately. 

But 4.16 adds a cool new report. If reports can be cool. Which they probably can't.

On your report page you should see the new Check Report. This will break out the checks you should expect to see in the mail. Clicking on the date or amount will let you drill down into the individual transactions that make up the check.

I really want to make this helpful for you, so if you need this data in CSV format or some other format, please don't hesitate to let me know.

Last night saw the release of BuyPlayTix 4.10 which contains many bug fixes and performance improvements. As always the full release notes can be found here.

But there are two big new features. 

Punchcard Passes

BuyPlayTix has had Season Passes and Festival Passes. But both of those are tied to one person getting a ticket to a list of shows.

A Punchcard Pass on the other hand is a block of discounted tickets. The patron buys the pass which has a set number of punches (say 6). They can then use that pass to buy 2 tickets for each show of the season, or use it to buy 6 tickets to one show.

Passes are a feature that has to be enabled in BuyPlayTix. To do so choose Settings. Then click on Global Settings. Choose the Sales tab. Check the Passes checkbox, and click Save Changes.

Combos

Combos are my second attempt to solve the problem of selling double-bills (and it may not be the last). With a combo you can set a group of shows to be grouped together under one price. Combos can be grouped across productions. The price will show up in the cart with the tickets grouped.

This post could also be titled "Why I may start ignoring Facebook marketing". Like many people I've put a fair amount of time and effort into Facebook marketing. Facebook determines what shows up in your feed by using a formula called EdgeRank. Click and read. You may not understand all of it, but it's still worth taking a minute. Then come back.

After reading about EdgeRank I started actually looking at the "Insights" that Facebook provides about each post. This information is fantastic. You can see how many people liked each post. How many shared it. And how many saw it.

That's right. How many saw it.

As in. I have 325 people who have liked my Facebook page. In the case above 70 people saw the post in question. A post that contained a custom comic book promoting the show. A post that was really cool and fun and not full of marketing flack. Only 22% of the people who have gone out of their way to say they want marketing information from Loaded Gun Theory in their news feeds were actually provided that information. Now look at my MailChimp stats.

At first glance, this looks pretty similar. 27.8% is a little better, and I have more people I'm sending to. But opens are only tracked if the user has viewing images enabled. So if they read the message without enabling images they don't get counted. And it also doesn't count the advertising potential of just presenting my email subject in a patron's inbox. With email marketing, every single one of my patrons gets the opportunity to read my email. With Facebook. Facebook determines which ones get to see it. Now you want to get really depressed about Facebook marketing? When I look at the list of people who opened my email in MailChimp it's a list of people who are not associated with the production. When I look at the list of people who've shared my post on Facebook, it's members of the production staff, cast, and crew. Sharing in a little closed loop. Our conversation basically only exists for each other.

Sure I could follow all the Facebook marketing guidelines. I could drive engagement with contests, surveys, and questions. But why? Engagement with my patrons happens at the theater. They have already engaged and built a relationship with me in the real world.

And finally we get to the landing page. One of the first questions that usually comes up is "how do I link this to my website". There are lots of complex answers to that. But the simplest is now the landing page. You can get the link to your specific landing page by going to 'Productions' and clicking on the Links icon. It's the first link listed. Here's what it looks like:

A question I used to get a lot was, "Can't you just deposit my ticket sales directly into my bank account?" For a while PayPal was really the best way to do this, but my payment provider Batchex recently added this feature, so I was able to add it to BuyPlayTix. In the application click on 'Settings', then choose 'Global Settings'. On the Billing tab you'll see an option for Disbursement method. Choose E-Check then enter your account and routing numbers (these are generally the two numbers in the lower left corner of your check). Don't forget to hit 'Save Changes'!  

One of BuyPlayTix's coolest features is one of its least used. Did you know that every time you sell a ticket you can have that contact's email address put into your email marketing application? Well as long as they opt-in to your mailing list. We do still obey the law. Currently BuyPlayTix exports contacts to MailChimp, YourMailingListProvider, and ConstantContact. In BuyPlayTix 4.8 I moved this out into its own page off of the Settings page. Just look for Contact Settings.

You can setup all 3 of the providers here, but let's try out the newest one - ConstantContact. First click the 'Authorize BuyPlayTix' button.

After a few seconds you'll be redirected to ConstantContact's web page. Enter your account information and login:

Next you'll need to grant BuyPlayTix access to your account.

Have you logged into BuyPlayTix recently? Noticed anything different?