When the ticket page dies the week of the show

Week of the show, the link stops loading. Or the page loads fine and sales are already closed. Either way, the house is now selling at the door with whatever happens to be on somebody’s laptop.

Community theatre people say this out loud, in the groups, every season. The ticket page went down when they needed it most. They sold at the door. The backup plan was a spreadsheet and a stack of email confirmations.

Two failure modes, one night

The page is down. Hosting, a vendor outage, a theme update that ate the embed. Patrons refresh and give up. The volunteer at the table has no way to see who already paid.

Sales closed early. The storefront stops taking money hours before curtain. Walk-ups get told to pay in the lobby. Will-call is a printed list that was accurate at lunch and is now missing the four people who bought after dinner.

Both nights end the same way. The door becomes a second box office, built in a hurry, by the people who were supposed to be ushering.

The door is not a backup plan

A volunteer house has no spare box-office staff to call in. The person on the laptop is a parent, a board member, or whoever was standing closest when someone handed over the charger. They are already doing a job tonight. Now they are doing tech support in front of a line.

The ticket page and the door should be the same sale, so a bad night for a website is not also a bad night for the house. That is what we are building Places to do: one list the storefront and the table both read, so nobody reconstructs the house at 6:30.

If tonight is that night, who is actually selling tickets is about the person at the table, and who holds the ticket money is about the part nobody notices until the invoice arrives.

Tools are free. You only pay at the door: a dollar when a reserved seat sells. General admission is free for small events for a limited time. Comps and free tickets are $0, because a comp is not a sale.