Managing seats for a performance

A seated event sells one seat at a time, and not every seat in your hall belongs on sale on Esora. You will always have reasons to hold some back, and they are yours to keep track of, not ours to classify.

The Seats tab is where you decide which seats Esora sells, one performance at a time.

Two states, two actions

Every seat in your hall is in one of two states, and you choose which:

On sale on Esora — buyers can pick it on the seat map right now.
Not on sale — Esora does not sell it. Whatever your reason, this is the state for it.

So there are two actions: Put on sale and Take off sale. Nothing else about a seat is decided here, and no reason is required.

The note

When you take seats off sale you can add a note — the reason, in your own words. “Kept for the mayor’s guests”. “Broken chair”. “With the box office”. It is optional free text on purpose: the reasons are yours, and Esora does not need to understand them to keep the seats off sale.

The note appears on the seat panel when you select the seat, in the List view, and in the History. Buyers never see it. Putting a seat back on sale clears its note.

What you see but never set

Four more things appear on the map. They are facts rather than decisions — a buyer, a guest ticket or your pricing produces them:

Being bought — someone has that seat open in checkout right now. It comes back on its own if they do not pay.
Sold — someone bought it.
Invited — the seat carries a free invitation ticket.
No price set — the seat is on sale, but no ticket type covers it, so nobody can buy it. You fix it on this tab: select the seats and press Set price. See Setting seat prices.

A sold seat stays sold. Take off sale never touches a seat someone has bought or is buying — those seats are refused and the sheet says so before you confirm. Nothing is cancelled, nothing is refunded, nobody is moved. Undoing a sale is a refund, and refunds live in Orders, Guests & Refunds.

Finding the tab

Open esora.app/manage, pick your page, open the event, and go to Seats. The tab appears only for events with a seated hall — see Reserved Seating for how a hall gets built. Like the rest of the console it is a desktop screen; on a phone, use the Esora Organizer app.

One performance at a time. If your event runs on several dates, pick the date and time at the top: each performance has its own hall and its own decisions. Every confirmation repeats that date and time, so you always know which night you are changing.

Inside the tab, one control switches between three views of the performance you picked: Map, List and History. The map is the hall. The list is the same seats as a table — zone, row, seat, price, status, note, who holds it, order code — and it is how you work by name, email or order code instead of by geometry. History is the timeline, below.

Putting seats on sale

A new hall starts with nothing on sale. The hall is yours until you open it.

So the first time you open the tab for a performance you see one question, Which seats should Esora sell? Nothing is on sale yet, and two ways to answer it:

Put the whole hall on sale — one click, every seat on sale.
Choose seats on the map — select a block first, then put it on sale.

You can put more seats on sale at any time: hold the balcony back for a week, then open it when the parterre is nearly gone.

Selecting seats

Click a seat to add it, click a row label to take the whole row, shift-click for a range within a row, or click one of the counts above the map to take every seat in that state at once. The panel tells you what you have — “20 selected: 17 on sale, 2 sold, 1 being bought” — and the button tells you what it is about to do and to how many seats before you press it.

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 someone’s checkout.

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 two states are yours.

History

History is the third view, beside Map and List. It is the performance’s whole timeline, newest first: who put which seats on sale or took them off, when, what they were before, and the note they typed. Sales, invitations and refunds appear in the same list, so one timeline tells the whole story of a performance’s hall. Older lines sit behind Show more at the bottom, and a line that touched too many seats to list them offers Show seats.

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 — same preview, same record.

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

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