The waitlist

Selling out is good news that usually gets thrown away. A fan arrives, sees "Sold Out", and leaves with nothing recorded. The waitlist keeps them.

When a ticket tier sells out, fans can join a queue for it straight from your event page. If a seat frees up later, because someone cancelled, a payment was refunded, or you raised the quantity, TribeNest offers it to the people at the front of the queue automatically.

There is nothing to switch on. The waitlist appears once a tier is sold out.

What a fan sees

On a sold-out event page, a Waitlist section appears under the tickets with the line "Sold out. Join the queue and we'll email you if a ticket is released."

Each sold-out tier gets its own card with a Join waitlist button. Opening it asks for:

• their email address, unless they are already signed in, in which case their account address is used,
• their first and last name, both optional,
• How many tickets?, from 1 to 20.

They do not need an account. The fan is told, plainly, that you will only email them about tickets for this event.

Once they have joined, that card is replaced by their place in the queue: the tier, how many tickets they asked for, and their position. They can click Leave waitlist at any time.

What happens when a seat frees up

TribeNest works down the queue in order and emails an offer to whoever is next. The offer email carries a link straight back to the event with the seats attached, and a deadline.

The fan then sees one of two things on the event page, and the difference matters:

• Reserved for you. The seats are genuinely held off the market for the whole window. Nobody else can buy them. The page tells them the exact time the hold runs out.
• Tickets available. An offer exists but the seats are not held, so they need to buy quickly to secure them.

Either way they get a countdown ("Buy within 42m 10s") next to the exact deadline, and they check out from Buy tickets as normal.

If an offer lapses without being claimed, it closes and passes to the next person in the queue.

Reading the waitlist in your dashboard

1. Go to Events then My Events and open the event.
2. Click the three-dot More menu in the top right.
3. Choose Waitlist.

Three numbers sit at the top:

• People waiting, still in the queue across every tier.
• Tickets wanted, which is how many tickets those people asked for. Release this many and you clear the queue.
• Offers out, people who have been offered a ticket and have not claimed it yet.

Below that, one row per tier, ordered by the length of its queue, showing Waiting, Tickets wanted, Available now, Sold, Held, and Capacity.

"Held" is stock reserved by checkouts in progress or by offers already made, so it is on its way to being sold without having sold yet.

Releasing more tickets

There is no separate release button. To free up seats, do the thing that actually creates them:

• Raise a tier's quantity. Open the event, edit the ticket type, and increase Total Quantity. See managing tickets.
• Raise the venue capacity if that is what is capping you, on the event's edit form.

As soon as inventory exists, the queue starts being worked through and offers go out on their own.

Use Tickets wanted to size the decision. If the number is 38 and you can find 20 more seats, you know before you start that you will satisfy roughly half the queue.

When the waitlist closes

Fans can join while an event is scheduled, on sale, or sold out. Once an event is cancelled or has passed, no new sign-ups are taken.

If you cancel an event, the waitlist for it is part of what stops. Nobody gets offered a seat on a show that is not happening. See cancelling and postponing.

Where to next

• Need more seats to release? See managing tickets.
• Want to tell the waitlist something yourself? Everyone holding a ticket can be reached from emailing attendees.
• Checking what the run has actually taken? See ticket orders.