How to create a regular product

Adding a product such as a brochure, meal option or merchandise to be sold via Box Office, online or both can be a simple and effective way to help your organisation increase revenue. In addition products can:

• Enhance the event experience for audiences making them more likely to purchase additional items and attend future events.
• Allow for cross-promotion by partnering with other brands if possible, further increasing revenue and exposure.
• Encourage higher spending per transaction through upselling and bundling of merchandise packages or bundles that include tickets and other products.
• Provide deeper customer insights through product sales, giving valuable insights into customers' preferences and spending habits, which can inform future marketing strategies and product offerings.

How do Products work in Ticketsolve?

Products merchandise, brochures, snacks and drinks can all be added into Ticketsolve to be sold through the system. These products can be built in Ticketsolve as 'regular' products. Regular products have all the basic functionality required to be sold, managed and reported on through Ticketsove, but are more general than other specific product types available like 'money voucher' or 'donation', which have extra functionality within Ticketsolve.

Creating the Product

Go to Manage > Products.

1. Click Add New to create a new product.

2. Select the Product type as Regular Product from the dropdown.

3. Next, give the Product a Name.

4. You can then and add a Price.

5. A Comment (description) can be added which will be visible to the customer online. You do not need to add a comment if it isn't necessary. 

Once everything is filled in make sure that the Active product? and Can be sold? toggles are not on yet, as there's a couple more steps to go.

6. Click Add to create the new Product.

Customising the Product

There are further customisation options which you can set if you want to - but these are not required. 

1. Priority decides the order in which the Product is displayed in the Products tab on your Ticketsolve website, with a priority of 99 being the highest and 1 being the lowest.

2. Permit printed receipt? should be on if you want the customer to have a printable receipt when this item is sold (in the form of an e-ticket or printed ticket, depending on the fulfilment option selected on the order).

3. Assign to program? if there is a program that the Product should be associated with. 

4. If you want the product to be posted and use price bands for postage, add the Weight of the product including any packaging.

5. Allow price override means the price can be manually set at the point of sale. An example, would be a credit voucher product, where the amount would change each time depending on the credit you want to give. This should only be turned on for a regular product if it is being sold only at the Box Office (by turning Disable online sales? to On), as you don't want customers to be able to set their own price when buying a product online. 

6. Apply tax if VAT should be calculated when reporting on sales. 

7. Reference if required for reporting.

8. Tags can be added if needed.

At this stage you can also add an image for the Product if you want to, using the file uploader. 

Lastly, in the Settings tab you can amend the following if necessary:

• "Email_note" which is any specific message about the product that you want to appear in customers' order confirmation email.
• "Fulfilment_options" allows you to set which fulfilment options set up on your account are available on this specific product. For example, you might have Postage available for event tickets, but don't want it to be available for this product.  
• "Template_data_print_at_home_product" is where you can amend the design for the e-ticket/receipt for this product that the customer downloads as a PDF from their order confirmation, if e-ticket is selected as the fulfilment option when the product is sold. You can see examples of this for voucher products in our guide to creating an e-voucher. This works the same way as the "template_data_print_at_home_ticket" setting which allows you to customise your e-ticket.

Putting your Product on sale

When you’re happy with your setup, you can enable sales by turning Active product? and Can be sold? to On and press Update.

This will put the Product for sale both at the Box Office, and online.

This is how the product will appear on your online Products page:

If you only want the product to be sold at Box Office and not online, then make sure to also toggle Disable online sales? to On.

If you are looking to really boost your product sales, you can set up Product Prompts which presents product suggestions to customers during their purchasing journey. Product Prompts are a great way to promote your products at the right moment in the sale, increasing the upsell and cross sell opportunity. 

You can read about how Liverpool's Royal Court maximised revenues using products to upsell meals, programmes, offering extras, and upgrades all through Ticketsolve. 

For set up alerts when a specific product is sold, check out our guide on automated email alerts for product sales.