11.1 Creating Orders (Partners and Brokers)

Once your Client has picked a ticket group to purchase and you have created a new Client (or retrieved an existing Client’s ID) and created a credit card for them you are ready to create the order.

Holding the Tickets

Currently, you cannot place hold or reserve tickets at any time.

If your customer takes a while to checkout you may wish to retrieve the ticket group just before submitting the order to review that the price is still acceptable and the quantity you wish to purchase is still in the splits array.

Determining the Shipment Options

We recommend that you do not present your customers with the ability to select a shipment type. 

shipment_type

The format of the ticket group will guide you to which type you should use for the shipment portion.

service_type (FedEx only)

All orders should be created with a service_type of LEAST_EXPENSIVE. LEAST_EXPENSIVE is a pseudo service_type that we created and uses FedEx’s API and our own algorithm to determine the least expensive real service_type will have the tickets delivered to your customer with a (roughly) four hour buffer before the event begins. For example, if FedEx says that STANDARD_OVERNIGHT will be delivered by 6:30pm and the event begins at 8:00pm then the airbill would likely be created using PRIORITY_OVERNIGHT so that the delivery would happen by 10:30am.

signature_type

FedEx offers several choices for signature options when they deliver packages.

See the FedEx Service guide for additional details.

Should you choose to require a signature you should ensure that the package is being delivered to an address where the recipient will be available to sign for the package. FedEx will usually make 3 delivery attempts before returning the shipment to you at an additional cost to you, which will at best require another shipment at your expense or at worst, cause your customer to not receive their tickets in time for the event.

How Much Should I Charge For Shipping?

What you charge for shipping/delivery is entirely up to you. There is currently no cost to your for any of the delivery types except FedEx and therefore, many Brokers and Partners do not charge for any of the delivery methods except FedEx. If you do want charge a fee for Eticket, TMMobile, and FlashSeats we suggest anywhere from $3.50 to $6.95 per order. We do not recommend charging for LocalPickup or GuestList delivery.

FedEx

Although we ask that you do not provide an explicit service_type, the service_type is one of the main factors in determining the shipment cost and most Brokers and Partners choose to charge different amounts for the different service_types. These are the amounts we suggest charging.

We suggest using one of three methods for determining what to charge your Client for FedEx shipping.

Flat Fee

Simply charge a flat fee for shipping knowing that some shipments will cost you less and some shipments will cost you more. If you choose this route we do suggest that you have one fee for US shipments and a higher one for shipments outside the US.

Sliding Flat Fee

Similar to the Flat Fee approach, but add some additional logic on your end that looks at the in_hand and in_hand_on values of the ticket group and compare to the occurs_at date of the event. Charge one fee if the event is more than a week later than the in hand date and a higher fee if less time. We suggest having two additional prices for non-US shipments.

Shipments / Suggestions

We offer a Shipments / Suggestion endpoint that allows you to send the ID of the ticket group as well as the recipient’s address info and we will return the service type we expect to be used as well as the price you have set in your Settings for that service_type.

Suggested Pricing for FedEx Shipments

See the FedEx Service guide for details and delivery times.

Paying for FedEx Shipments

Unless you choose to use your own shipping account you will use the Ticket Evolution FedEx account and take advantage of our discounted rates. We will bill you weekly via credit card for any shipments that FedEx bills us for during that week. Pricing is determined by FedEx based on a number of shipper and recipient location, the service_type, and the signature_type.

Shipment Examples

Below are some examples of the shipped_items portion of the JSON used to create an order. Although both shipped_items and items are arrays, each order must be for a single set of tickets. If you wish to allow your Clients to purchase multiple sets of tickets at a time you should either have multiple objects in your orders array or make multiple POSTs to the /orders endpoint.

Physical Tickets Shipping via FedEx

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385270025,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 5,
              "wholesale_price": 3.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "FedEx",
          "service_type": "LEAST_EXPENSIVE",
          "signature_type": "INDIRECT",
          "residential": true,
          "ship_to_company_name": "Leftorium",
          "ship_to_name": "Ned Flanders",
          "address_id": 111111,
          "phone_number_id": 33333
        }
      ],

Physical Tickets with Local Pick Up

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385270025,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 5,
              "wholesale_price": 3.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "LocalPickup",
          "ship_to_name": "Ned Flanders",
          "notes": "Please contact Ned to arrange when and where to pick up his ticket.",
          "phone_number_id": 33333
        }
      ],

Print at Home Tickets (Etickets)

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385270025,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 5,
              "wholesale_price": 3.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "Eticket",
          "email_address_id": 333333
        }
      ],

Flash Seats™ Electronic Transfer

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385269975,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 10,
              "wholesale_price": 8.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "FlashSeats",
          "ship_to_name": "Ned Flanders",
          "email_address_id": 207924,
        }
      ],

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385269975,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 10,
              "wholesale_price": 8.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "TMMobile",
          "ship_to_name": "Ned Flanders",
          "email_address_id": 207924,
        }
      ],

      "shipped_items": [
        {
          "items": [
            {
              "ticket_group_id": 385269975,
              "quantity": 2,
              "price": 10,
              "wholesale_price": 8.25
            }
          ],
          "type": "GuestList",
          "ship_to_name": "Ned Flanders",
          "phone_number_id": 33333
        }
      ],

Payments

When creating an order you must detail how payment is being from your Client to you. You can accept multiple payments per order, allowing someone to split their charges across multiple credit cards if you wish to allow this. Use the amount property of each payment to indicate how much should be charged to each credit card.

Unless your order has multiple payments, you can omit the amount as the default is to charge the full amount of the order to the credit card. The total amount will be calculated as (price * quantity) + shipping + service_fee + additional_expense + tax - discount.

Example of a Single Credit Card Payment

      "payments": [
        {
          "type": "credit_card",
          "credit_card_id": 22222
        }
      ],

Example of a Splitting Payment Across Three Credit Cards

      "payments": [
        {
          "type": "credit_card",
          "credit_card_id": 22222,
          "amount": 800.00
        },
        {
          "type": "credit_card",
          "credit_card_id": 22223,
          "amount": 500.00
        },
        {
          "type": "credit_card",
          "credit_card_id": 22224,
          "amount": 250.00
        }
      ],

Taxes

Ticket Evolution will collect taxes where necessary on the purchase from us (the "wholesale" portion of the order). It is recommended that before you create an order you create a Tax Quote in order to see how much you will be charged for taxes.

Additionally, if you would like to know what, if any, taxes you should charge your customer you can include the retail information in your tax quote and the response will include both the wholesale and retail tax information. The response from Tax Quote / Create will also include a tax_signature that you should include in your order object.

If you have resale certificates for any states please get in touch with us so we can update our tax service accordingly.

Promo Codes

Within your Settings we provide the ability to create Promo Codes for use in your site/app. Promo codes can be for a specific amount or for a specific percentage and may be single or multiple use.

If your customer enters a promo code within your checkout you should use the Promotion Codes / Index endpoint along with the supplied code to verify the code is active and retrieve the information needed to properly apply the discount. When creating the order you should send both the promo_code used as well as the US dollar amount you have calculated to be the correct discount amount. Note that the value used with discount should be supplied as a positive number but it will be subtracted from the total. Regardless of which type or promo code you submit with an order, our system does not perform any validation of the discount amount your specify.

Single Use Promo Codes

If you submit an order with a promo_code our system will verify that the code is still active and if the order is successfully created that promo code will be marked as used and cannot be used again. If the order is canceled or refunded for any reason the promo code does not get reactivated.

Multiple Use Promo Codes

If you submit an order with a multiple use promo code our system does perform any validation of the promo code.

Example of using a Promo Code

      "promo_code": "10DOLLARSOFF",
      "discount": 10,

Putting It All Together

The Orders / Create documentation contains multiple examples of creating orders with the various shipment types.

Success!

If your order is successfully created the response will be the order itself in JSON form, similar to what is returned by the Orders / Show endpoint. 

When you create an order where your Client is purchasing tickets from your Office our system will create an order where your Office purchases the tickets from Ticket Evolution at the wholesale_price of the tickets (unless you are a broker and the tickets are owned by your Office). The order will have an identifier (the oid parameter in the response) in the format of 1111111-2222222. The purchase order created for you will have a similar oid, usually just differing by one such as 1111111-2222221. Internally we call the first portion (1111111) of that number the order group and that is the number the customer service team will user when referring to your order.