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Hey guys, i was wondering if anyone had any references for a system where i could let others book a seat for a seminar that a customer does. If i could have it so they would pay, then they would be admitted in the group of people that are attending it. Any suggestions on online systems that work well with this? Thanks.
-Shawn

Do you need to literally pick a seat (as in seat number, location etc..)?

I don’t know of any software that does it.  You could do it via some custom PHP.

As far as they payment adding the user to a new group of people attending, that’s one of the main features of the Simple Commerce module.

I’ve made a reservation system for a theatre with Solspace Freeform. Needed some custom queries to make a reservation counter. But most of this works pretty much straight from EE

Payment is not included. I turned it around; if you make a reservation you’re added to the list and you have to pay. For a theatre you can pay at the entrance, isn’t that possible for the seminar?

Maybe you could combine it with the simple commerce module, but that relies on Paypal. Not everyone has that (especially not in Europe where I work)

Off the top of my hat, I can think of about half a dozen reasons why paying at the door is a bad idea: You actually have to handle cash (with the associated cost), you need to fully finance the seminar (rent for room, equipment, etc) upfront (instead of using some of the registration fees), and finally: How are you handling no-shows? If they paid in full, in advance, you couldn’t care less, but if they only “made a reservation”? If the seminar is booked out, no further registrations possible, and then only half of the people show up?

You could be right about that.

For this theatre it works fine, they have quite a standard group of visitors that tend to be reliable. I’ve never heard them complain about the use of cash.

Cinema’s work the same way. Normally extra tickets are sold at the counter as well. But for a seminar it might be different.

I just proposed as a simple solution. You could go for a full reservation system, but costs might be too high if it’s a small seminar.

I’ve never heard them complain about the use of cash.

A theatre is used to it, I suppose, but cash handling is still a nuisance. You need some equpiment (a cash box, at the very least), (more) reliable employees, it needs to be counted and deposited, and still can get stolen.

Cinema’s work the same way. Normally extra tickets are sold at the counter as well.

Sure, but they have generally a cut-off time. If you don’t pick up your reserved tickets 30 mins or so before the show starts, they’re going to sell them anyway. Perhaps not what you’d want with a seminar.

You could go for a full reservation system, but costs might be too high if it’s a small seminar.

I agree, just pointing out why reservation only might not be the best solution.

I’ve done this for a Summer camp booking system. 
Unfortunately it was before I discovered EE.
It’s a pretty straight forward php/mySql shopping cart type thing.
People choose the camps they want to register for, and pay online (PayPal)
A counter checks against a camp capacity limit set by the administrator.
When one is full it puts up a Call for availability message instead of the add to cart button.

The back end allows admins to enter in phone and mail in orders as well and either run a cc or mark as paid by check and then pull rosters for each camp.

There’s another post that is also talking about a registration system for classes. Same principle.
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/73748/#365812

You just need to thoroughly think out what your business process is going to be.

This is one of the really great things about EE, is the ability to build custom functionality inside of your installation.  I’m not that deep into EE yet, but I surely recognize the potential! Especially now with release 2.0 being built ontop of the CodeIgniter framework.

James

Thanks for all of the reply guys, but I have an idea. What if there was a way i could make some kind of plugin/addon that would add an extra field to the simple commerce items table that would have a number (say, 15) of tickets that we had for a specific event. I would make a new membergroup for each seminar date and when the # of people in a membergroup reaches 15 it would close the item in the simple commerce item table? I know a bit of php/mysql, but i know nothing about actually creating addons/mods.

If you are willing to use the simple commerce module, it can actually keep track of inventory, so you’d only have to add a new “product” (read: seminar) to the store, quantity: 15. Once all the 15 seats are gone, you’ll be “sold out”, and your users won’t be able to buy any more seats. Only accepts PayPal at this time, though.

theres inventory in the simple commerce engine?!? lol, thanks for the smack in the head Ingmar

At the very least, you can use {item_purchases} to see how often each item has been sold; I remember implementing at least rudimentary inventory functionality that way.

aaah, ok, that makes sense. Thanks.

Ingmar, do you have an example we can review?

We are using simple commerce and each product “trip” has a limited number of (seats). I am not clear as to where I add quantity (seats) to the “trip” so we may then have a countdown on the site that reveals number of remaining (seats) per “trip” aka product.

Any help would be appreciated : )

Unfortunatley not. But it made use of a custom variable to hold the number of available seats, the SCM’s {item_purchases} and some trivial arithmetic with PHP. Really nothing fancy.

You don’t add them, you subtract {item_purchases}.

Thanks. I understand the subtracting; however, how do I set the original quantity to begin with?