Sales channels and allocations

A sales channel is an allocation label on inventory you already have. It primarily answers which buyers are allowed to select this seat before it sells? and can optionally carry a sparse price book for that audience.

Everything else stays exactly where it was. One event, one chart, one authoritative seat count.

This is the canonical feature overview for channels, allocation, organizer controls, and Partner access. Continue according to your role:

The one-minute model

Take a 1,000-seat event:

All four audiences read the same event, the same chart geometry, and the same inventory. Selling A-12 through Travel Agency A makes A-12 booked everywhere, immediately: on the public page, in your reports, and in every open buyer session. There is no reconciliation step or second source of truth, because there is no second inventory.

Assignment is not status

A seat’s channel and a seat’s status are independent. Every seat always has both.

Assigning a seat to a channel never changes its status. A free seat in a private channel is still free; it is simply invisible to buyers who are not eligible for that channel. This is why assignment is safe to run on a live, selling event.

It is also why a channel is not a way to take a seat off sale. If nobody should sell it, block it.

What a channel is not

The five things that get confused with channels, and the feature that actually does each job:

One seat, one channel

A seat belongs to Public sale or to exactly one private channel. Never two.

Overlapping membership makes “how many seats does the sponsor have?” unanswerable and turns every allocation edit into a precedence question. A buyer may see several allocations, but a seat belongs to only one. A buyer access session can name several channels at once, so a sponsor who is also an agency customer sees both allocations without either seat being in two places.

That keeps every allocation total exact and every seat’s answer to “whose is this?” a single value.

Public sale is a real allocation, not an absence

Seats not assigned to a private channel are Public sale. It behaves like any other allocation in reports and in the API, with counts, sell-through, and inventory movements. Two differences apply:

• it is the default, so every event you already have is entirely Public sale and stays that way until you say otherwise. There is no migration;
• a Managed public/unlisted event needs no grant for Public sale, while a Platform/SDK embed uses its publishable publicKey to obtain an origin-bound, Public-only session directly from SeatLayer.

In the API, Public sale is the reserved channel id public, and a seat on public sale reports channelId: null. The direct public-key bootstrap fixes its scope to Public sale and accepts no browser-supplied channel list. A server-requested buyer access session must still say includePublic explicitly. There is no default, and it is required whenever the buyer also needs private channel inventory.

Manage a channel in Control Room

Open the event, choose Channels, and use the channel rail as one continuous workflow: allocate inventory, choose how it is distributed, then preview what that audience can see.

Assign inventory at the right scale

Choose the destination channel first, then select inventory in the way that matches the job:

• Sections adds one or more complete sections;
• Rows adds several logical rows, including segmented rows shown as one row;
• Drag box selects a region directly on the map;
• Category adds every seat in a price or access category;
• Seat list provides the same selection with keyboard-accessible checkboxes;
• clicking individual seats remains available for small corrections.

Selections are additive and stay staged until you review and apply them. The review separates seats added from Public sale, seats moved from another private channel, seats already at the destination, and seats that cannot move because they are held or booked. Moving inventory out of another private channel is the only ordinary assignment that needs an extra confirmation.

Category, section, and row selection expand to the exact inventory units that exist when the assignment is applied. They are not permanent allocation rules: after publishing new seats or changing labels, review the Channel again because new inventory starts on Public sale until it is deliberately assigned.

After Apply, the review closes and a success bar reports exactly how many seats moved and how many were skipped. Details keeps the authoritative server breakdown available without making it a second required step.

Choose a distribution method

Open a private channel and choose Distribute this channel. Only the setup for the selected method is shown:

Changing the distribution method does not move seats. A self-service method is marked Set up until an active link or buyer session exists, and Live only when the server confirms buyer access is active.

Set a channel price only where it differs

Open a private channel and choose Edit prices. Each blank field inherits the event’s current category or ticket-tier price; enter only the audience prices that differ. Saving is versioned, so if another operator changed this price book while you were editing, Control Room refreshes the current values and asks you to review instead of overwriting them.

Channel pricing is authoritative, not a display hint. The buyer sees the scoped price, the server resolves it again when the hold is created, and that hold freezes both the unit price and channel pricing version. A later edit changes future selections only. Public inventory and private inventory without an override continue to use event pricing.

If an active event ticket release overlaps a channel price, the narrower channel price wins and does not consume the release quota. At the Box Office, staff can deliberately select a named release; that explicit choice wins over the channel price and retains the release attribution.

Give a partner its own context: Partner access

When an agency, sponsor, school, corporate group, promoter partner, or reseller needs to work its allocation rather than only read a report, open the private channel and choose Partner access. Name the partner organisation, invite one person by email, pick a role, and choose the permissions that channel carries.

The partner does not get a login to your workspace and there is no separate portal. They accept with their own SeatLayer account (the invitation only works for the invited email; a new account is created on the spot if needed), and the access appears in their workspace switcher next to their own workspaces. Their own events, floor plans, and billing stay in their workspace; your channel lives in a partner context with its own left menu: Overview, Allocations, Distribution, Reports, and Team.

Roles

Roles are set per person. You can change a role or remove a person at any time, and a Partner manager can do the same for their own teammates from the Team page (never for themself). A change takes effect on the partner’s next request.

Permissions and terms on the assignment

Every partner request is authorised on the server against the membership, assignment, role, and enabled permission. Hiding a button is not an authorisation boundary. A partner cannot expand its own allocation, see a sibling channel, buyer identities, booking references, or anything in your settings and billing.

Revoking

• Remove a person: that account loses the partner context for every allocation you have given that partner organisation.
• Remove the assignment: the channel leaves every member’s context; the inventory does not move.
• Remove the partner organisation: ends every assignment of that partner in your workspace.

Existing buyer holds keep their ordinary lifecycle. Buyer links the partner created stay live until you revoke them from the channel’s access links, so buyers who already received a link are not cut off by surprise.

Preview before distribution

Use Preview buyer access to request the same server projection a buyer session receives. This checks the real channel scope and optional Public sale access; it is not a browser-side approximation and cannot create holds.

Share a live report with the channel partner

From Performance → Channel, choose Share partner report on a private channel. The partner opens a clean, read-only report with:

• the selected channel’s allocation, sell-through, and attributed sales;
• the exact assigned seat or inventory labels and their current status;
• search and status filters for large allocations; and
• a CSV export of that same scoped inventory.

Other channel names, buyer identity, booking references, and event-wide totals are never included. Attributed revenue is off by default and must be enabled for each link. Creating and revoking links remains an organizer action; the partner does not need a SeatLayer account.

The URL is shown once, can expire after 7–180 days, records its view count and last-viewed time, and can be revoked immediately. It is a bearer capability, so forwarding it gives the recipient the same read-only access.

For a recurring partner that needs organizer-approved distribution, return, or request actions, use Partner access instead. It keeps the same event/channel privacy boundary while binding access to the partner’s own verified SeatLayer account rather than a shared report URL.

A channel id is not authorization

A channel id is a label, not a key. Sending one from a browser grants nothing, and a browser cannot select private inventory by naming a channel it guessed, was told, or read out of your page source. The server derives what a caller may select from the credential the caller presents, and ignores any channel the client claims.

What actually grants access:

• a buyer access session (bse_…), requested by your backend and minted by SeatLayer for one buyer, one event, one origin, and a named set of channels;
• a hosted access link, which a buyer exchanges for one of those sessions;
• a Partner access membership, checked on every request against the partner’s own verified account, the assignment, the role, and the permission set;
• a secret key that explicitly names the channel it is acting for. See the booking behavior change.

An unauthorized buyer does not receive a private seat’s real state at all. Private inventory reads as one flat unavailable state, whatever is really happening inside it, and a public map receives no updates from activity it is not allowed to observe.

Continue by role

• Partner guide: sell an allocation: hosted-link selling and the organizer-brokered SDK path
• Sales Channels API: create, price, assign, pause, and archive
• Buyer Access Sessions API: mint and revoke buyer scope
• Organizer guide: integrate private sales: the end-to-end implementation
• Reports: allocation and sale attribution per channel