Managing seats for a date

The Seats tab is your hall for one date. Every seat is drawn, its shape and colour say whether buyers can buy it, and beside the hall a panel says in words what you have selected and what will happen if you press a button.

Three things happen here, and nothing else: you put seats on sale, you take seats off sale, and you set what seats sell for.

Finding the tab

Open esora.app/manage, pick your page, open the event, and go to Seats. The tab appears once your venue has a seat map: when a date of the event is on one, or when Esora drew a hall at the venue of one of your dates. Until a date is on the map, the tab lists your dates and lets you put them on it; see Reserved Seating for how a hall gets drawn. Like the rest of the console it is a desktop screen. On a phone, use the Esora Organizer app.

One date at a time. The date and time you are working on is the first thing above the hall, after the word Date. If your event runs on several dates, open the menu (Which date?) and pick the one you want; past dates sit under a Past divider. That date is written again under the count when you select seats, in every sentence that says what a change will do, and in every Done. message, so you always know which night you are changing.

The link How seats work, in the panel beside the hall, opens this article in a new tab.

What the hall shows

The whole hall is on screen when you arrive: the stage, every seat, and the names of the sections. Use Zoom in, Zoom out and Fit hall above the hall, or pinch on a trackpad, and move the hall with a two-finger scroll.

On a big hall the seats are small, and the first click on them zooms in and selects nothing. That is on purpose, and the label that follows your pointer says so before you click: Zoom in to select seats. Section names can be clicked at any size, row names appear before seat numbers do, and the instruction in the panel names only the gestures that work at the size you are looking at.

The five states

Beside the hall, under The hall and the hall’s seat count, are five lines, one per state, each with the mark the hall draws for it and the number of seats in that state. The five always add up to the whole hall.

State	On the hall	What it means
On sale	a solid green disc	Buyers can pick it right now.
No price	a dashed amber ring, the empty shape buyers see	No ticket covers the seat yet, so nobody can buy it. Setting its price puts it on sale. See Setting seat prices.
Being bought	a disc with its left half filled	Somebody has that seat open in checkout. It comes back on its own if they do not pay.
Sold	a disc with a diagonal slash	Somebody has a ticket for it.
Not on sale	a thin grey ring	The seat has a price and Esora does not sell it. Whatever your reason, this is the state for it.

On sale, No price and Not on sale are yours to decide. Being bought and Sold are facts a buyer produced, and you never set them here.

Every one of the five lines is also a way to select. Click Not on sale and every seat in that state is selected, and the hall moves so those seats are in view.

The control Colour seats by at the top of the panel switches the hall between State and Price. It changes where a seat’s fill colour comes from and nothing else; the five shapes stay the same in both. Price colouring is described in Setting seat prices.

Selecting seats

There are five ways. A seat adds to what you already have; a row, a section, a table or a drag selects only those seats, unless you hold Shift, which adds them instead.

Click a seat. Works wherever seat numbers are drawn. Clicking it again takes it back out.
Click a row name. Selects only that row. Hold Shift to add it to what you have. A name shows whether none, some or all of its row is selected. While the hall is zoomed in, the row names of the section you are looking at stay at the left and right edges of the view, so a row that is wider than the screen still has a handle.
Click a section name or a table. Selects only that section, or every chair of that table; Shift adds it. Section names are readable at every zoom, so this works even on the largest hall before you zoom in. A table has no name of its own: click the table itself.
Drag across seats. Selects only the seats whose centre is inside the rectangle; Shift-drag adds them to what you have. The panel reminds you of this while something is selected. The seats light up and the panel counts them while you drag, so nothing is a surprise when you let go. A drag is the tool for a block that is not whole rows; for whole rows, the row names are cleaner, because a drag across curved rows also catches the ends of the rows above and below.
Find. The field above the hall, Find seat, note or order…, matches a seat (Stalls 5-12), a row (Stalls 5), a section, an order code, or words from a note. Click a result to add its seats, click it again to remove them, and the hall moves so the seats are in view.

The panel then says what you hold: the count, where those seats are in the hall (“Stalls rows 3–5”), the date, one line per state present, and what the seats sell as. Clear selection under the count empties it, and so do Escape and a click on empty floor.

How do I find the seat of a particular buyer?

The hall holds seats, notes and order codes. It does not hold names, emails or phone numbers, so a search for a person finds nothing here and says so: No seat, order code or note matches “anna”, with Search orders for “anna” under it. That opens Orders, which searches across all your events. See Orders, Guests & Refunds.

From the other direction it works here: select a sold seat and the panel shows its order code with Open order, which opens that order in a new tab so the hall stays as you left it.

The three actions and the one review

Under the panel, on every selection, the same three buttons in the same order: Put on sale, Take off sale, Set price. An action that could not change anything is replaced, in its own place, by a sentence saying why: All 18 seats are already on sale.

Pressing one opens a review in the same panel. The hall stays where it is, so nothing ever covers the seats you are changing. Every review has the same parts:

The title and the line under it, always “{count} seats · {date}”, so you can see which seats and which night.
What the action needs, if anything: a note for Take off sale, a ticket for Set price.
Sentences with counts for everything that will happen, including what will not change: seats that are already on sale, seats somebody holds, notes that will be deleted, and how to reverse the change later.
The button, which repeats what it is about to do: Put 56 seats on sale, Take 15 seats off sale. What the button will do is written above it before you press it.
Back, at the top left, away from the button.

Press the button and the change takes effect at once. There is no draft, nothing to publish, and no second confirmation dialog: the sentence you read is the confirmation. The seats repaint, your selection stays, and a message says what happened: Done. 56 seats went on sale for Sat, Mar 3, 2029 · 19:30.

What if a seat is sold while I am reading the review?

If the hall changed while you were reading, you are asked to read it again. When somebody else sells, refunds or changes one of your selected seats between the moment the sentences were drawn and the moment you press, the first press changes nothing and the panel says what moved: This changed while you were reading: 2 seats were sold. Read it again, then press the button. The counts are corrected in front of you and the next press goes through. You never approve a number that is no longer true.

Putting seats on sale

A new hall starts with nothing on sale. Every seat is No price until you give it one, and the panel says how to open the hall: No seat is on sale yet. The event page says “Not on sale yet”. To open seats, select them and set their price.

A priced seat is on sale. Setting a price puts the seats on sale in the same step; there is no second step to open them. To hold some back, price them with the rest and then Take off sale: hold the balcony back for a week, then Put on sale when the stalls are nearly gone.

Put on sale opens seats that already have a price. Seats with no price stay off sale, and the review says so before you commit, 115 of these seats have no price, so they stay off sale. Set a price to put them on sale, with Set price instead. See Setting seat prices.

A new date sells the way your last date does. When you add a date to an event whose dates sell on a seating plan, the new date gets the same hall, and every seat takes the price and the on-sale choice it has on the event’s latest date. The new date is on sale as soon as you add it; open its Seats tab only to change something. A date added to an event whose hall was never priced gets the hall with every seat at No price.

What buyers see before you put seats on sale

While nothing is on sale, the event page says not on sale yet, never “sold out”. People can still follow the event, and nobody is told it has gone when it has not started.

After that, buyers see the real picture: sold out when every seat you put on sale has gone, and a note that seats are being bought when the last ones are sitting in somebody’s checkout.

Taking seats off sale

Select the seats, press Take off sale, read the sentences, press Take {count} seats off sale. The seats become thin grey rings and buyers can no longer pick them.

The note

The review offers a field, Note for your team (optional): the reason, in your own words, up to 200 characters. “Kept for the mayor’s guests”. “Broken chair”. “With the box office”. It is free text on purpose: the reasons are yours, and Esora does not need to understand them to keep the seats off sale.

Under the field is the one rule about it: Buyers never see it. It is deleted when the seats go back on sale. The note appears on the seats in the panel when you select them, and in Changes.

A sold seat stays sold

Take off sale never touches a seat somebody holds. Select a whole row that has sales in it and the review separates them: 3 seats stay as they are: 2 sold, 1 being bought, and names which ones. The button then counts only the seats that change. Nothing is cancelled, nothing is refunded, nobody is moved. Undoing a sale is a refund, and refunds live in Orders, Guests & Refunds.

Where a seat goes when a sale ends

Refund a ticket and its seat comes back by itself, to the state it had before the sale: on sale if that is where it was bought from, off sale if you had taken it off. A checkout somebody abandons does the same after a few minutes, without you doing anything.

What a sale ending never does is change your decision. A seat you took off sale stays off sale, with its note, even after the ticket on it is refunded. Sales come and go on their own; the decision is yours.

Changes

With nothing selected, the panel has a row called Changes with the last one under it: Last change: Anna Petrosyan, Sep 12, 14:02. You know at once whether anything happened since you last looked.

Open it and the panel becomes the date’s record, newest first, one entry per thing a person did: who, when, what, the note they typed, and which seats. Buyers’ own events (started buying, sold, refunded, hold expired) are in the same timeline in lighter ink, and long runs of them fold into one line you can open. Older entries sit behind Show earlier changes. New entries never push the list while you read it; a line at the top offers them.

Select these seats, on every entry a person made, puts that entry’s seats back in your hands: they are selected, the hall moves to them, and the three actions are there. That is how you reverse a colleague’s change, and how you find seats somebody else touched without reading row numbers.

Back to the hall, at the top left, or Escape, closes it.

There is no undo button, on purpose. Every action has an opposite one: seats put on sale by mistake are taken off sale again. Reversing a decision is a change like any other, with the same sentences before it and the same record after it, and Changes keeps both.

Stop using the seat map

To sell a date without seats again, press Stop using the seat map at the bottom of the panel, with nothing selected. The panel asks first: Stop using the seat map for Sat, 1 Mar · 19:00? Buyers will no longer pick seats. Seat prices you set for this date will be removed. Press Stop using the map and the date leaves the hall: it sells its tickets without seats. It is listed again at the top of the tab with Use this map, in case you change your mind.

This works only while no seat of that date is sold or in a buyer’s checkout. Once one is, the date stays on the seat map and the panel says how many seats are sold. Write to us if you need to change it.

Why did the buttons disappear and the panel say "Connection lost"?

If the hall stops receiving updates, the panel says so: Connection lost. The hall stopped updating at 14:12. You can change seats again when it is back. The three buttons are not there while that message is up, because a hall you cannot see the truth of is not one to change. Your selection, and anything you had typed in a review, are kept. When the connection returns the hall refreshes and the buttons come back where they were.

Setting seat prices for choosing what each seat sells for
Reserved Seating for how a seated hall is built
Orders, Guests & Refunds for following sales and refunding tickets
Check-In: Scanning Tickets at the Door for what your door staff see when they scan
Ticket Types & Pricing for the tickets your seats sell as

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