If you’re running a box office using any piece of software, it’s important that you’re able to add sales from the back-end. Using My Tickets, there are a number of ways to add new ticket orders as an administrator. You can only process payments by going through the public shopping cart, but if you have any other means to accept payments – cash, check, credit card terminal, Square Register, etc., then you can set up a ticket order and process that payment without going through that process.

New payments are added from the WordPress dashboard by going to the “Payments” menu item.

Payments Menu item

Go to “Payments” > “Add New”. If you don’t have a shopping cart set up, you’ll see the message “Visit the public web site to set up a cart order”. This isn’t because you need to go through the front-end to create a purchase; it’s because you need to add items to the shopping cart. If you have an active shopping cart on the front-end, you’ll have access to that shopping cart from the admin panel as well.

You can edit the contents of the shopping cart in the front-end as long as you haven’t saved the payment in the admin – once the payment is saved in the admin, the contents are locked.

Visit the public web site to set up a cart order.

As soon as you set up a shopping cart on the front-end, however, you’ll see that in the add payment form:

Cart item added

You’re not restricted to setting up payments using just your cart. If a user creates a cart while logged-in, you can copy that user’s shopping cart from their user profile into the admin panel.

Navigate to the User’s profile at Users > All Users and open their profile to edit.

edit-user

Generally, the user’s shopping cart will be visible towards the bottom of the profile screen. However, this can vary depending on what other plug-ins you have installed.

Shopping cart in user profile.

From the user profile, you can simply click the link “Create new payment with this cart” to copy the cart into a new payment.

If the user isn’t logged in, the process is a bit more labored, but it’s still possible. For users who aren’t logged-in, My Tickets inserts a meta field into the site header with a unique cart ID. You can ask users to view the source of the page to retrieve their cart ID (there’s no way to obtain this information without the purchaser providing it to you). The ID should appear very near the top of the source code, and look like this:

<meta name='cart_id' value='HXKFiBbmm00JfaAT' />

Once you’ve retrieved that cart ID, you can use it as a parameter to add a payment for the cart:

http://www.example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=mt-payments&cart_id=HXKFiBbmm00JfaAT

At that point, you can submit their purchase to the system. This is a convenient way of handling ticket sales problems by phone or at your box office while keeping all of your ticket sales within a single system.

Filling in the admin payments form is a simple process, with relatively few fields. You must specify a payment status and ticketing method, and you’re recommend to provide all other data.

You can’t specify a user as “Do not email” at the time of data entry, because the system needs to be able to send at minimum the receipt and purchase notification emails. However, all subsequent email messages sent to the user using the “Contact Purchaser” forms will include a link for the user to remove themselves from your mailing list, and this data will appear in their purchase record. If they make a future purchase, they will still receive the basic purchase notification, however, as this type of contact is a fundamental business need.