Expiring Registration if payment has not been made in X Minutes

I have commented this on another post but i'm creating a new since the proposed solution there was not the same.

We usually have lot's of unpaid registrations. This is a problem when we are reaching our seats limit or when we are reaching the time limit where tickets will not be sold.

In our case, our event is a Dinner Party so we need to know at least 24hr in advance the aproximate number of ateendees in order to order enough food for everyone. 

We have lot's of reasons for people registering and not promptly paying:

- Please like to early register to "secure" their seat but only pay when they are sure they can come
- People sometime make registrations for themselves and endup making a second registrations for themselves and a friend forgetting the previous registration
- Non tech savy people duplicate registrations without even knowing
- People forget or are too busy

What i propose is the option to put a configurable timer on that registration when it's in the unpaid status canceling it if payment has not been done. Of course this would only make sense to automated payments plugins but you could even force offline payments like "you need to send us payment proof within x minutes".

I know you have the waiting list but that doesn't solve our logistic dinner problems and also our unpaid registrations end up to be mostly paid and the rest duplicates, errors etc.

I hope more Events Booking vote on this feature because there is not a single joomla extension that does this and it saves alot of headaches when your have limited seats events where you need to prepare food for example acoordingly to the number of attendees.

Thanks everyone

Hello

Are these unpaid registrations using offline payment? That's the only reason it is counted and causes the registration reaches limit as you described

If so, this plugin eventbookingdoc.joomservices.com/plugins/offline-payment-handle might help (it allows cancelling registration after certain time if no payment received)

Tuan

I was editing my post when you answered

No, we try that our payments are fully automated so when a client pays it automatically release the ticket(s) and we keep bank transfer with proof sent by e-mail just for elder people but in our case it's used by maybe 5% of users. With automated payments i keep less administrative work, less errors and above all, a better experience to the client because they pay and receive the ticket right away. Here in Portugal we have easy ways to pay using home banking and your phone which everyone uses all the time.

What happens is i'm constantly monitoring my orders in the backend, not my available seats. Availablke seats are a reflecetion of what tickets i have sold in a given time, my orders are a projection of what will end up to be


Let me give you a couple of examples of our event which is a Dinner Party Hosted on a Saturday:

Case 1
Let's say i have 80 seats available and on a friday afternoon (our event will be next day on saturday) i have 50 registrations and 30 of them are payed registrations. We are reaching the deadline when we shop for groceries to make our dinner.
For this unpayed 20 registrations, probably 2 or 3 are errors that we can identify and the rest we just don't know. What do you do? We need to call each person and ask if the intend to come and ask them to pay because we need to buy those groceries in advance. It's totally different to make food for 30 or for 50 people!
Those unpaid registrations were probably gonna be paid later that evening or in the morning same day at the event (real story) but for us that's not soon enough to know.

Case 2
Let's say i have the same 80 seats and 3 days to deadeline where tickets will stop being sold and i have 50 paid registrations and 28 unpaid registrations reaching almost our seat capacity if everyone actually pays. Now in those 3 days, more registrations come and are promptly paid, and some of those 28 also payed in the meantime. What do you do? You start to panick because now you really have available seats BUT if everyone one pays, you become overbooked. On the otherhand you don't want to announce you're sold out with unpaid registrations because you never know if those people are gonna finish the buy and you want to fill those seats if possible.

So limiting the unpaid status by x minutes (i would consider a value between 5 to 30 minutes) would have the advantage of reduce these uncertainties (for some events it's not relevant but as you saw in my case and probably others it's really paramount) and also i think it would help in those cases of impulse shopping where the buyer changes his mind if he doesn't have to hurry and pay.

So i guess what i'm asking is that functionallity of offline plugin made available to every payment plugin