A giant waste of money and time.

Remember, you are to review the lite version not the pro version here.

I started with the lite version and upgraded to the pro because I didn’t recognize this giant problem, which is present on both – until it is too late. I want to prevent other people from making the same mistake.

Hi! I’m sorry to hear about your confusion and frustration with Event Espresso. I am one of the Event Espresso support team and we would have been happy to work with you on your issues/concerns in the support forums had you posted them there. Writing a negative review of a product that specifically correlates to a support issue is neither helpful to you — because you don’t get the answers or the support you need — nor to anyone else considering the plugin — because the issues and concerns expressed in the review may not be relevant to them or their specific setup.

With regard to your specific issue which is the crux of your review:

Event Espresso lets people rsvp for an event without paying for it

This is inaccurate — although I suppose it depends on what you mean by “rsvp”.

When an attendee registers for an event — specifically clicks the “register” link, adds their information, confirms and proceeds to the payment process — a record is stored for that attendee. Yes, this happens even if an attendee has not paid — because you may not want to just abandon unpaid registrations when you can, instead, send them a payment reminder to ask for them to complete the registration process (e.g. and pay) at a later date.

However, by default — unless you have changed the default registration status settings — the status of that attendee is INCOMPLETE until payment has been received, unless an event is a FREE event (e.g. the price is set to 0.00). And, also by default — unless you have changed the email settings — no email will be sent to that attendee stating that they have registered if payment is not complete. Incomplete registrations do not count against the total number of available spaces in an event (Complete and Pending registrations do).

Now, it’s possible the registrant never sees the payment page because you have no payment gateways set up. However, even in this case, the attendee would still not be marked complete if payment was not received, unless the event was a free event.

Therefore, unless by “rsvp” you mean that an attendee record is created, the underlying issue of people being able to gain access to an event without paying is not an accurate summation of Event Espresso functionality. Note that this is all based on a clean WordPress installation using a theme that makes proper use of WordPress core coding guidelines (e.g. proper use of jQuery, etc), and, again, we would have been happy to look into any theme-related or environment issues on your site had you used our support forums for the premium version.

The length of and number of settings referred to in Mr. Reynolds’ response basically reenforce my point.

Moreover, I had several exchanges in the forums and with “programmers.”

This problem was never resolved.

As for a negative review not being “helpful,” hopefully the review is helpful for people considering the plugin.

If you can provide the link to your forum posts we can follow up there.

Several people from your team – not one person who might engage the problem and figure it out, but instead a whole bunch of different people who passed around the problem – had their chance.

I’m done wasting time and money on your plugin.

If not for yourself, a link to your specific issue(s) in the forums will help us solve this or similar problems for other users considering the plugin. If we can’t identify where we failed to help you resolve your issue, then we have no means of improving the plugin or our support for the plugin.

Thank you for this very helpful review. Any system that allows a user to “RSVP” without payment is not helpful for me. It’s very easy thing:
You’ve paid for a seat or you haven’t. An event full of RSVPs where no-one has paid is a nightmare. Moreover, people being what they are see they’ve ‘RSVPd’ and assume that they have a right to attend.

I am glad I came to read the reviews as I was about to spend $ on the full package.

As Chris mentioned above, with Event Espresso YOU HAVE THE OPTION TO REQUIRE PAYMENT OR NOT. You do not have to require payment to register a.k.a free ($0) events or you can require payment with fee/paid ($xx) events. It’s simple.

You have the option to require payment or not, but at least as far as I could figure out – and the multiple techs could explain – you have no way to make that payment and the RSVP process the same. People can RSVP and *not* proceed to payment. Which is worthless for someone who requires payment in order to reserve a place (aka RSVP). It just confuses everything.

you have no way to make that payment and the RSVP process the same.

Again, this must depend on what you are considering an RSVP. To me, an RSVP is something I send personally to an event organizer saying that I will be there. An RSVP does not imply payment, it just implies attendance.

While the record for an attendee is created when a user registers for an event (but fails to complete the payment process), their “place” at the event is not used up (e.g. if there are a limited number of seats available, the non-paying attendee does not get a seat). Additionally, if you are using the premium version of the plugin with the mobile check-in app, an attendee who has not paid cannot attend the event — they would not receive a QR code to scan and if, for some reason they did, when it was scanned, it would return an invalid registration since they had not paid.

The attendee record is created so that event managers can follow up with people who have abandoned the registration process. So it goes one step further in trying to retain potential lost customers than most shopping cart systems do. But an incomplete registration does not imply, or mean in any way, that that is a valid registration.

This is exactly the problem.

I don’t want to follow-up. That creates more work. I want people to buy a ticket or not.

That you don’t recognize this is mind-boggling.

@superfish: Thanks for the great feedback, much appreciated. Event Espresso was built upon customer feedback, like yours, so I am very interested in what we can do to make Event Espresso meet your specific needs. Can you please give us an example of a system that does what you are looking for? Would mind outlining the RSVP functionality you are looking for? Your feedback will definitely help us build a better open source product.

Thanks!

Seth Shoultes
Event Espresso Co-founder

I have been following this post. I am very interested in purchasing this plugin, although a little scared right now.
However, I would like to give you a chance to set my doubts straight.
From what I understand superfish’s complaint is that when RSPVing the user is under that impression that his presence was confirmed, even though he didn’t go through the payment process.
This user’s data is stored for CRM actions, but shows RSVP as INCOMPLETE.

My biggest doubt is how does this look for the user?
A video of your plugin working would probably help a lot.
??
And if your plugin delivers everything as well as it seems, I’ll gladly pay.

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