Waitlist

When a ticket type sells out, people can join its waiting list instead of walking away. This screen is where you decide who gets a seat when one frees up — you admit them, one by one, rather than the platform booking whoever has waited longest.

What you can do here

• See everyone waiting for each ticket type: their name, email, how many tickets they want, and how long they have been queuing.
• Each entry shows a status — Waiting, Booked, Not accepted, or Expired.
• Approve an entry to give that person the seat. This creates a real order for them on the spot.
• Reject an entry. They are emailed, and they cannot rejoin this queue afterwards.
• Switch the list on, cap it, and choose how long an admitted person has to pay — all under the event’s Details & dates.

How approving works

1. Find a Waiting entry for a ticket type that now has room, and click Approve.
2. An order is created for that person immediately, and the seats come off public sale straight away. Nobody else can buy them while the order stands.
3. If the ticket is free, the order is confirmed at once and their tickets are emailed.
4. If the ticket is paid, they are emailed a payment link. They hold the seat until the payment window you set runs out.
5. If the event uses request and approve, the order joins your approval queue instead, and you make the usual decision there.
6. If they do not pay in time, the order is cancelled automatically, the seats go back on sale, and the entry is marked Expired. You do not need to tidy anything up.

Settings explained

• Waiting list — whether people may queue for a sold-out ticket type at all.
• Book waitlisted people automatically — leave this off (the default) to admit people yourself with Approve. Switch it on and the platform books the longest-waiting person the moment a seat frees, without asking you. Events created before this setting existed keep booking automatically until you change it.
• Payment window — how long an admitted person has to pay for a paid ticket, from half an hour to three days. It used to be a fixed 24 hours.
• Queue limit — the cap is per ticket type, so a full queue on one popular tier does not lock people out of the others. It counts tickets, not people: one person can be waiting for four, and a limit of 50 means fifty seats’ worth of demand.

Good to know

• Approving does reserve the seats. They are held for that person for the length of the payment window, so two people cannot be admitted into the same last seat.
• Approving is refused, with a reason, if the event is no longer selling — not live, the ticket type switched off, the sale window closed, or not enough stock left for the number they asked for. This is checked at the moment you click, not when they joined.
• Members are placed ahead of non-members in the queue, if you sell memberships and have given them waiting list priority.
• A ticket that cannot be booked on its own — a child or carer ticket — has no waiting list. There would be no adult ticket alongside it to make the booking valid.
• You are notified when seats free up on a type that has people waiting, so you do not have to watch this screen.
• Rejecting is final from the attendee’s side: they see the outcome on their own bookings page and cannot queue again for that ticket type.

Troubleshooting

• “Where is the Notify button?” — there is no longer one. Notifying sent an invitation and reserved nothing, so two people could be invited into one seat and the loser was told it had gone. Approve gives the seat to the person you choose and holds it for them.
• Approve is refused — the message says why. The usual cause is that the seats went to somebody else between the list loading and your click; reload and check the ticket type still has room.
• An entry says Booked but no money has arrived — that is a paid admission inside its payment window. It resolves itself either way: they pay, or the window closes and the seat is released.
• Somebody you rejected asks to be added again — delete their entry and ask them to rejoin; the block is tied to the rejected entry.

Related

• Ticket Types
• Orders
• Booking Modes
• Details & Dates