It's been a long time coming...many months of hard work and sweat to bring our users a whole new shopping interface. We will fully shift HoldMyTicket.com to our new design on March 1st, so read on to learn about what to expect:

Shopping cart

Customers can now add tickets to their cart and continue shopping for different events before checking out. After adding tickets to your event to their cart, they'll see the option to proceed to checkout, with some of your events recommended below. If you don't have any more published upcoming events, they'll be directed straight to checkout.

Users can continue shopping around, add more time to their cart and edit its contents from any page on HoldMyTicket.com.

Now that users can shop to their heart's desire, transactions occur per venue. That is, if they're buying tickets for multiple events, especially for events at different venues, they can choose their preferred ticket delivery method for each ticket type, and be charged separately for each venue, while only submitting one purchase.

Transactions

Charges that occur on HoldMyTicket will be transparent and easy to understand. Before submitting an order, a user will see the amount they will be charged, plus the way the charge would appear on their bank statement.

If you utilize HoldMyTicket's Stripe merchant account to handle your online sales, a credit card statement for tickets to your show would appear as "HldMyTckt - your venue name."

If you have your own merchant account through Stripe, you can now change how the statement would appear per venue in your Venue Settings. Under Venue Preferences scroll down to Payout Preferences:

*Note that while this will affect the credit card statements for most users, it will not necessarily be effective 100% of the time. The customer's bank has the ability to override the way that a transaction appears, regardless of the settings you choose for your own merchant account.

New look for your events and checkout

Your event page:

The new design includes an image header at the top of your page with your flyer to the right. A user can see the event description and select their tickets all on the same page.

The header will use the background image you upload in event settings in Spark, under the "Event Page" section.

If you don't upload an image here, it will take the default Checkout Page Masthead you have uploaded in your venue settings, under Branding/Identity, giving all of your events at your venue the same header image.

If you haven't uploaded an image in either of these places, the event page header will give a map to your venue.

Also enjoy the new design of checkout:

Any errors that might occur at checkout - a missing required field, invalid billing information - will give users an easy-to-understand error message to help them quickly solve the problem and get their tickets.

Upsells

The new interface now offers upselling like it never did before, and it keeps users looking at your events.

To manage which events you upsell and when, use the new Promoted Events tool in your Event Overview. Choose specific events to be presented to your ticket buyers, and choose how many. Otherwise, upsold events will simply be organized by tags, which you can also take care of in your Event Overview.

Improved interactive seating charts

Seating charts now enable full screen view. On both Web and mobile, users can make no mistake in understanding your venue's arrangement and choosing the exact tickets they want.

Now a user can click into one section then click straight into another without having to zoom back out.

Selecting seats places tickets in a drawer on the left, where the user can choose the ticket type they want, if you have set up different ticket types (such as child, adult, or member rates) to apply to the same seat.

No more impossible-to-tap seats on the mobile site. Mobile users can pinch and zoom on their screen to make that seat as big as they need in order to tap it.

Reserving seats is also more reliable: Browsing and clicking seats does not claim a seat until clicking "Add to Cart." When you have multiple people using your seating chart at once, as soon as one user adds a seat to their cart, that seat will disappear from view for all other users on that page.

Try it out, let us know!

As always, nothing helps us more than your feedback. We are excited to apply our new design to your event pages and improve the overall experience on HoldMyTicket. We owe our knowledge and development to the needs of our users, so keep helping us help you!

The HMT Team got together last weekend for our traditional team "outing." This time we stayed in the office, and we witnessed...

THE

BEST

K.O.

EVER

Nov. 14's UFC 193 matchup with Albuquerque's own Holly Holm and (then) world champion Ronda Rousey made our hometown explode with excitement and "burque pride." Nothing excites burqueños more than food, beer and a win by one of our own that changes UFC history!

Here are a few bets that went down between Holm and Rousey supporters:

• Not one, but two bottles of Jameson
• A car wash
• Coffee duty for a month
• A bottle of tequila priced at at least $100

That same night, the Sunshine Theater had a show just a few floors below our office. You can usually feel any noise as mild as a sound check when a show is getting started, but when Rousey took that end-all kick to the head, HMT shook the building.

Holly's name will be chanted around this town and our office for a long time!

It's been another busy month here at HoldMyTicket. We have just launched some new features and improvements to the HoldMyTicket platform for you to enjoy. Here we go:

Spark is now Mobile Friendly!

Whew! Its been a long time coming, we finally made SPARK user friendly on your mobile device. Now you can get reports, edit tickets, and manage all of your events from your phone without pinching and zooming or yelling and screaming. Take a look at your account on your phone, we think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Mobile eTickets Revamped

We made some slight modifications to the mobile eTicket allowing for faster loading, better readability, swiping between multiple tickets, and optimized size of QR code. Next time you see a customer come in with a mobile ticket, be sure to take a look!

Calendar Subscriptions

We made it easy to subscribe to other iCal feeds, whether they are public or private. You will just need to know the URL of the iCal feed, and it will appear alongside your events in SPARK. This is helpful for getting a list of holidays or internal office events. If you want to subscribe to US holidays, use this URL: http://ical.mac.com/ical/US32Holidays.ics

SPARK Inline Notes, Announcements, On-Sales

Now you can easily toggle the scheduled event announcements and on sales within your view of your upcoming events. Just toggle the buttons in the upper right of the list to see when things are going to be announced and sales are turned on. If you have created internal notes within SPARK, they will also show here as long as they have been tagged with a date. This is really useful if you want to create reminders for upcoming events and tasks.

User Guides

We fully revamped and organized our user guides making it easier than ever for you to learn about our latest features and best practices. The search feature is a great way to find exactly what you are looking for. We plan on adding more and more guides as we can. Please feel free to request new user guides you would like to see. Go ahead and take a look at our Docs to learn something new!

Embeddable Widgets

We just added three new embeddable widgets to give you more options when it comes to displaying event information on your websites:

• Just announced!
• Now on Sale!
• Event Tickets

HoldMyTicket Video

We are excited to share our new video. We feel it shows the culture and type of company we have become over the years. We want to thank all of our clients for the support and encouragement. Thanks to the guys at Marble Street Studio, they did a fantastic job!

You can see the video here.

We are excited to share our new video. We feel it shows the culture and type of company we have become over the years. We want to thank all of our clients for the support and encouragement. Thanks to the guys at Marble Street Studio, they did a fantastic job!

We enjoyed another year with the International Santa Fe Folk Art Market. Every year the market continues to grow, we are pleased to be able to grow alongside this fabulous event. Here are a few pictures we snapped.

HoldMyTicket is proud to be working with the Premier Development Soccer League! Check out this press release regarding Albuquerque Sol FC's home field and ribbon cutting ceremony:

Albuquerque Sol F.C. News Release
www.abqsolfc.com Thursday January 30th, 2014 ALBUQUERQUE, NM

The new PDL Western Conference team, Albuquerque Sol F.C., will be celebrating the announcement of their home stadium for their inaugural year in the Premier Development League on Friday January 31st at 2:30pm MST. Mayor Berry will be cutting the ribbon to kick off the first season of PDL soccer at 2:30pm MST on Ben Rios Field at the campus of St Pius X High School. He will be joined by Gary Oppedahl, the new Economic Development Director for the city of Albuquerque as well as several other distinguished guests.

It has been an extremely exciting time for soccer in the state of New Mexico with the launch of Albuquerque Sol F.C. The club has peaked interest in players from all over the southwestern United States as well as some foreign players. The Sol held their first open tryouts at the beginning of January and attracted 115 young men to try out for the team.

St Pius X High School is located at 5301 St Josephs Dr NW on the west side of Albuquerque.

For further information email General Manager Larry "Lencho" Espinoza at [email protected].

We recently updated HoldMyTicket.com to support web user accounts. This means anyone visiting HoldMyTicket.com can sign in using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Creating a web user account happens simultaneously as the user signs in, and only takes a few seconds. Web users get access to speedy checkouts, order histories, our Affiliates Program, customized content and more. Here's how web user accounts work: Web users begin by going to holdmyticket.com, and clicking the 'Login' button in the upper right part of the screen. They'll be prompted to login using Facebook or Twitter.

Once the user has logged in, they'll see their name and avatar photo in the top right, where the 'Login' button used to be. Users can click here to see the users' menu. The first step, after logging in, should be to go to the Account Settings page. This is where users can verify email addresses and save their information and preferences. Verifying email addresses is necessary if the user wants to access their past orders, change names on orders, or resend email confirmations.

Logging in as a web user has many advantages:

Default Location Logged in users can save their default location. HoldMyTicket.com will automatically display events near this location. Order History Users can easily see a list of all the orders they've made on HoldMyTicket.com. They can then click on an order to get order details.

Order Details Users can see all the details related to an order they've made. Confirmation numbers, event details, ticket details, delivery method and more info is available on the order details page. Additionally, users can easily change the name on their order, or resend the email confirmation related to the order.

Speedy Checkout Users can save their name, phone number and billing address under their Account Settings. This info saves time during the checkout process because it is automatically loaded into the checkout form. All the user needs to do is select their tickets and fill out their credit card info to checkout!

Affiliate Program Web Users are eligible to participate in Affiliate Program. When users refer a new client to HoldMyTicket, they will receive 10% of HoldMyTicket's fees collected for each ticket they sell during their first year as a new client. Public API Key Web users will automatically be assigned a public API key. Found on their Account Settings page, this key can be used to access event info, order info and more via HoldMyTicket's API (Application Programming Interface). More info about how this can be used can be found here: http://holdmyticket.com/api/

We are proud to announce our latest app, Shift CRM, an integrated tool for managing your customer relations! Access Shift from either your Spark or Swarm accounts to use these fancy tools:

Features

• Leaderboards
• Buyer history
• Purchases
• Ticket scans
• Correspondence
• Order details
• Create notes
• Email confirmations
• Validate tickets
• And more! Here's what it looks like...

Activity

The Activity page in Shift CRM shows recent transactions in Swarm Box Office, as far back as 30 days. See at a glance which box office employee handled the transaction, be it a scan or a sale.

###Leaderboards The Leaderboards page displays a list of your top-ranked customers. Their rank is based on total activity, including purchases, ticket scans, money spent and more. You can view details on any of your buyers. BUYER INFO The buyer history page shows their basic info, rank, and a beautiful timeline showing their transaction history.

Order Details

The order details page gives you an in-depth view into the details of a purchase. See order dates, sales source, payment type and a graphical list of tickets purchased. You can also access a bunch of tools from the 'actions' menu. Easily print tickets or reciepts, make notes, send emails, scan tickets, process refunds and more!

A new version of SWARM, our mobile box office, is available in Apple's App Store! If you already have SWARM, we highly recommend you upgrade your device to the latest version 1.2. The new version runs faster, performs reliably offline, and is easier to use. Improvements include:

• Offline Scan Tracking: If your internet network happens to go down while you're scanning, the app will continue to scan tickets, storing them on the device until you get back online. New in version 1.2 is the ability to view offline scans.
• Scan Log: Every ticket scanned is now listed by scan time. This makes it easier to see the status of your last scan and gives you a scan-history at a glance.
• Better Network Stats: Not only will the app tell you if you are online or not, it now displays the network name as well.
• Latest iOS Support: SWARM 1.2 is compatible with the latest iOS operating systems, so feel free to keep your device updated with the most recent iOS version.

For more info check out SWARM's website Check it out in the App Store

We headed out to Los Angeles California this week to attend Pollstar Live and to exhibit our ticketing software to the event industry at Event Live Expo. We'd like to thank all of the event organizers for providing such a great opportunity to get to know our peers, clients and competitors. We have started some amazing new partnerships!

Check out our journey on our Instagram page

We've done a quick renovation of the shipping rates on our printed tickets. We made the changes in response to new rates issued by the U.S. Postal Service, but we've also adjusted the breakdown of how ticket orders get shipped out - and this will result in serious savings for a great deal of orders.

Here are the new rates:

100 tickets or less: $3.75
100 to 200 tickets: $4.50
200 to 500 tickets: $6.55
500 to 3000 tickets: **$13.10

Express rates (guaranteed overnight for most locations):

500 tickets or less: $18.95
500 to 3000 tickets: $39.95

For orders larger than 3000 tickets, just contact your customer support representative.

Photo Credit mikecogh via photopin cc

We are pleased to announce a few highly-requested features we've added to the HoldMyTicket platform. The new features we are announcing are:

• Box Office Status,
• Seating Chart Manager Redesigned
• Color Coding Seats
• Convert Holds into Sales

Box Office Status

We've separated the BoxOffice status from the overall status of the event. This will allow you to schedule an announce date, or place the event on hold, while keeping it visible in our BoxOffice browser page or SWARM mobile box-office app. There is no longer a need for switching between Box Office and On-Hold or Announce statuses just to place some holds on your seating chart, or to create your pre-sale tickets before actually going on sale with the event. If your event is published, it will automatically be visible in Boxoffice and SWARM, too.

Seating Chart Manager Redesigned

Editing seats with the improved UI is easier than ever. We gave the editor a fullscreen view rather than restricting it to a small viewing area. You are also able to view all seats for your seating chart by clicking the checkbox in the top right:

Show All Seats

Color coding for seating hold categories

That's right! You can now see your seats colored according to the hold category they belong to. Just click the new paint bucket icon on the left navigation to see your colors light up!

Last, but not least: Convert your "held" seats into sold seats with a click

You can now convert held seats to a sold seat, just make sure your held seat belongs to a category that has CAN SELL? checked. This will enable the conversion of a held seat to a sold seat. If you wish to not allow held seats to be sold, be sure they belong to a category that does not have CAN SELL? checked.

Note: This feature is not enabled for all Boxoffice users by default. If you wish to use this feature, please contact a HoldMyTicket customer service agent. To convert your held seat, just click it from the seating chart view in Boxoffice, like you would any other available seat.

A warning will tell you that you are about to convert the held seat to a sale. That's it for today's rollout! We're hope you enjoy these new features. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or other thoughts to send our way.