Printing plastic season cards
As a part of your season ticket sales, you may wish to issue some plastic season tickets or plastic cards for your supporters who prefer to use a physical ticket rather than a digital season ticket. Typically, this is set up by offering an upselling item during the purchase flow, and then delivering plastic cards to those who selected the upsell.
Note that you cannot print plastic cards directly from TicketCo; however, this guide will outline how to collect all the data you need to order cards from a third party or print through a separate software.
Upselling items
To set up a plastic card as an upselling item, you should first create a separate event called "Upselling", "Merchandise" or similar. When creating this event, note that you can set the event start and end time to last for as long as you are selling the season tickets. This event can remain hidden via the Make this event private checkbox.
You can now create your plastic card items which may look something like this:
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We suggest including an image and description which clearly illustrates the product.
Remember to change the Category to "Merchandise" and limit the number of tickets per order to minimum one and maximum one. |
Finally, head to the Sharing tab connect the item with your season tickets. You may find Share with events or Share with tags to be the best options here. For further details on how the Sharing module works, check out our Upselling help article.
If you are planning to send the plastic cards to your ticket buyers in the post, you may want to add an address field question type via the Questions module.
Remember to publish your upselling event when you are ready to go on sale. Read below for how to process plastic cards once the sales start rolling in.
Collecting season ticket data from the report
Now that you have sold some plastic cards, you will need to leverage the data from your season ticket report in order to create plastic cards which are scannable in our app.
Generating plastic cards
Please note that plastic cards cannot be printed directly from the TicketCo platform; however, our reports contain the data you need to generate the cards yourself or via a third party. In general there are two approaches to printing plastic cards:
1) Utilising a card printing software
If you have already have a card printing software such as Card Exchange, and your own plastic card printer, then you should be able to download the required data from our system and import it into your software. Please see below for important notes on how to correctly import the data fields into your software.
2) Ordering plastic cards from a third party
Some clubs prefer to order plastic cards from a third party printer service, and in this case you will need to provide the third party with the relevant data correctly formatted, usually in a spreadsheet. Please see below for important notes on how to download the data from our platform and ensure it is correctly formatted in your spreadsheet.
Important notes on processing the data
Ticket ID
If you download the XLS report on your season tickets, you will find a range of data fields which you may use for your plastic cards. The most important field when it comes to printing plastic cards is the Ticket ID field which contains a 16 figure code.
This code is what you or the third party will need to transform into a QR code for your plastic cards. If any other reference codes or data fields are used, the QR codes on your plastic season tickets will not be scannable in the TicketCo admin app.
Of course, you will likely want to use other columns in this file, such as the Section name, Row, Seat, Gate and Ticket Type name, as well as the First and Last Name columns.
When downloading the XLS file, some spreadsheet programmes may automatically convert the Ticket ID field into a scientific number such as this:
It is very important that the code remains a 16 digit series of numbers, so you must ensure this column is formatted and saved as a text field rather than a number.
Upselling items
If you have set up your plastic cards as upsells, then it is important that you extract the Ticket ID and other data fields for only those who have ordered plastic cards. To do this you will need to download both the XLS report from the upselling event and the XLS from the season ticket report.
In the XLS for the upselling item, you will find a column called Upselling ticket ID. This will contain the Ticket ID value for the exact season ticket which is connected to the plastic card. You can then search for the other data fields you need in the season ticket report by cross-checking the Upselling ticket ID with the Ticket ID in the season ticket report. Often a Vlookup formula comes in handy here!
Final steps
Once you have compiled the data needed for printing your plastic cards you can (1) import it into your card printing software or (2) forward it to the third party with clear instructions that they should convert the Ticket ID field to a QR code. We always recommend that you (or the third party) start by printing one card, and check that the QR code works by trying to scan in the ticket in our TicketCo app. If the scanning works as expected, you know everything has been set up correctly and you can continue printing. If you experience trouble with scanning the QR codes at this stage, please send an image of the plastic card in question, and the data used to support@ticketco.net and we will assist you.
If you are printing the cards yourself, you may want to do this in batches to save from importing multiple files into your printing software. Often clubs will print one round of plastic cards a few weeks before the season starts and then a second round closer to the first home game,
Remember to inform your ticket buyers about how they can collect their plastic cards if you have not already done so. The Contact attendees module can be very useful for this.