If you need to cancel or reschedule an event, you will find below all the help you'll need. Please read all the information on this page, including the notes at the bottom before taking any action.
1. INFORM YOUR CUSTOMERS
You should consider several ways to let your customers know about the situation.
1.a. Send an email to all your customers. You can get the full list of customers for any specific event from the Orders by Event report. You can also get the full list of customers for any specific performance form the Roll Call report.
1.b. Add a message on your own website to explain the situation.
1.c. If you are cancelling the event, add a message on your box office. You can do in multiple places:
- Change your event title by adding a prefix such as 'Cancelled'.
- Update the event listing to explain in more detail the situation.
- To keep the title and listing text visible, the event needs to remain published, so you need to prevent customers from buying more tickets. To do this you need to make your event artificially sold out by simply switching off the 'Used by Customer' option on each ticket. Once done, tickets can no longer be sold but your event will now show 'Sold Out' when customers try to buy tickets. If this is an issue you can replace 'Sold Out' by 'Cancelled' by using the 'Sold Out Message' field on the event Listing page (enter the word 'Cancelled' there and save).
1.d. If you are rescheduling the event, ask us (send us an email to
support@thelittleboxoffice.com) to change the performance dates and times. You can then update the event Listing with new text to inform your customers of the changes.
2. CHANGE OR TRANSFER THE EXISTING ORDERS
You have two options depending on how accurate you want your data to be, how much time you have and whether you will be scanning tickets on the door.
2.a. The simplest option is to tell your customers to come on the new date with their existing tickets and ask us to change the performance dates and times.
- Pros
- It's quick and simple.
- Scanning will work fine, even if the date and time on the printed tickets show the old date and time. - Cons
- Customers will not have tickets with the correct date on them.
- All orders for the event are updated so you might still need to process refunds for the customers who do not want to attend the rescheduled event.
- The system does not keep any record of the old performance once the date and time change has been made.
2.b. The comprehensive option is to change the orders affected.
- Pros
- All customers will have tickets showing the correct date and all will work as for any other event.
- The system will keep a record of the old orders and new ones, as well as performance.
- Cons
- It takes time and attention (there is a risk of human error from you when changing orders).
3. REFUND PAYMENTS
Depending on which payment processor you use (PayPal or Stripe), refunding is handled as follows.
Notes
- Before you start refunding it is a good idea to unpublish your event so that no one buys any more tickets.
- You can filter your orders' list to show only confirmed orders for a specific show (and/or performance) so you can see exactly which orders need to be refunded.
- When you refund a payment, both Paypal and Stripe will not charge you to process the refund but both will keep their original fee for processing the payment in the first place. (If you opened your Stripe account prior to October 2017 and still benefit from Stripe return of fees, please note that will cease to be the case on 1st May 2020).
- We (The Little Box Office) do not charge any fees on refunded orders, as long as the related orders are cancelled before the event date.
Important Note: your orders might contain tickets which you do not want to refund. If you need to issue partial refunds, please refer to these help pages referenced above.