How to set up ticket refund protection

Ticket refund protection is an add-on that customers can purchase in addition to their ticket. Provided by a third party, refund protection gives customers the ability to obtain a refund if they can no longer attend an event due to certain unforeseen circumstances. 

What are the benefits of refund protection?

Refund protection offers you and your customers a few key benefits.

• Peace of mind for customers
  Refund projects provides peace of mind to your customers and helps help build confidence and encourage purchases. With refund protection, customers know their ticket purchase is protected if they cannot attend the event for certain reasons such as illness, injury or adverse weather.
  
  
• A new revenue stream for your organisation
  As well as enhancing your organisations’ reputation with customers, refund protection is a potential new revenue stream (if a percentage of the refund protection purchased goes directly back to your organisation).
  
  
• Reduced refunding workload for your team
  Because a third party company manages the refunding process, partnering with a  refund protection service can reduce the workload for you and your team. 

Once you have signed an agreement with a third party company offering ticket protection insurance, you will need to set it up in Ticketsolve. In this article, we'll walk you through how to create a refund protection product and then report on it.

How to set up ticket refund protection in Ticketsolve

Ticket refund protection is essentially a product that can be sold and prompted during the checkout process - just like any other product you would set up for sale in the system. 

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. Give the product a Name.

4. Give the product a Price. This will be the agreed price per ticket that you have arranged with your chosen refund protection provider.

5. We would recommend adding a Comment to the product, stating that ticket refund protection should be selected per ticket (i.e., 6 tickets = 6 refund protection products). You should also include a link to the terms & conditions of the refund protection product on your partner site, so customers can check exactly what the partner T&Cs allow.

6. Tag the product with a specific tag e.g., 'ticketprotection'. This tag is important as it will allow you to prompt it during checkout and also report on sales.

7. Make sure that the Active product? and Can be sold? toggles are on (blue).

8. Click Add to create the new product.

Create the product prompt

Now you need to set the product to be 'prompted' to customers during the checkout process. The following steps will apply the prompt at the account level.

Go to Settings > General Settings.

1. Search for "Product Prompts" in the Filter settings search box. 

2. In the text box, type in the tag you gave to the product, in the earlier step, so 'ticketprotection'. 

3. Press Update.

You can apply the refund protection product prompt at show, subdomain, programme or event level. To do that, once you have created the product as explained above, follow our Product Prompts guide for setting up prompts at other levels for your refund protection product. 

Communication with customers

It is important to make it clear to customers that refund protection is applied per ticket - not per order. That means, customers need to purchase 1 refund protection product per ticket. If they misunderstand this, and they request a refund, they will only be protected for the quantity of refund protection products they purchased - not tickets purchased. 

We would recommend adding this into the Comment section of the product setup as mentioned above, as well as anywhere you advertise the product. 

Creating and scheduling sales reports

You will need to give your third party provider a sales report on the ticket refund protection product -  at the frequency they request. To do this, you can set up an automated report subscription. 

We recommend using the Sales Report called Orders Containing Product. 

When building the report, there are three sections to complete:

1. Product tag. Here you should enter the tag you added to the product, so 'ticketprotection'. 

2. Include refunded orders. You should tick this if you want the report to include any instances where a ticket refund protection product has been purchased, but you have since refunded it.

3. Hide personal data. This should not be ticked if you need to provide the protection provider with customer details such as name, phone number and email address.

Our guide on how to set up auto report subscriptions will give you a step-by step on creating and scheduling auto reports via subscriptions.

Now you are all set up to offer your customers refund protection on their ticket purchases!