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Barcodes and Allocation

Barcode Allocation​

How allocation of barcodes works is nuanced. It is important to understand how allocation works as misallocation can quickly lead to double sales.

Barcodes can be preuploaded against a listing. This can be done either by creating the listing with, or updating a listing to have, a barcodes property - see Creating Listings and Editing Listings.

Any listing can have barcodes set against them. If the event is configured to sell as barcodes and barcodes have been uploaded against the listing, then sales will come through with barcodes already assigned. You can tell which barcodes have been assigned from either the webhook, or the sale object itself - see Getting a Sale and Sale Webhooks.

Important: the barcodes are embedded within the sale in the GetSale endpoint, but within the notification object itself in the webhook.

Low-to-High or High-to-Low Allocation.​

Preuploaded barcodes are allocated to sales based on the seat_ordinal property provided when setting the barcodes against the listing. Barcodes are allocated from the lowest available seat_ordinal up. If you want to force allocation high to low, reverse the seat_ordinal order vs the seats - see examples below.

Allocate low to high:​

To allocate seats 1-4 low to high, list the tickets with a barcodes property where seat_ordinal ascends as seat ascends:

[
   {"seat_ordinal":0, "row":"A","seat":"1","barcode_values":["12345"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":1, "row":"A","seat":"2","barcode_values":["12346"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":2, "row":"A","seat":"3","barcode_values":["12347"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":3, "row":"A","seat":"4","barcode_values":["12348"]},
]

Allocate high to low:​

To allocate seats 1-4 high to low, list the tickets with a barcodes property where seat_ordinal descends as seat ascends:

[
   {"seat_ordinal":3, "row":"A","seat":"1","barcode_values":["12345"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":2, "row":"A","seat":"2","barcode_values":["12346"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":1, "row":"A","seat":"3","barcode_values":["12347"]},
   {"seat_ordinal":0, "row":"A","seat":"4","barcode_values":["12348"]},
]

N.b. it is not possible to, and you should not try to predict the allocation that we will use. Attempting to will cause double sales. Always use the barcodes provided in the API and webhooks.

Knowing When Barcode Preupload is Required​

Some events, at certain times, for certain sellers will require barcodes to be preuploaded. If you create a listing without barcodes for an event that requires barcodes, the undeliverable boolean on the listing will be set to true and the listing will not be purchasable. Remedy this by adding the barcodes to the listing. As preupload can become required at any time, a webhook is available to notify you when a listing becomes undeliverable.