# Allocate reserved seats to every audience—without splitting inventory.

Protect sponsor seats, give agencies their own scoped partner access, run a member presale, and keep box office and public sales on the same event. Each audience gets the right inventory, price, access, and attribution.

_Friday Evening · Event inventory ASSIGNMENT VERSION 12_

## What is a ticket sales channel?

It is a named allocation and attribution lane inside one SeatLayer event—not a duplicate event or a second seat map.

A channel can represent public sales, a sponsor, an agency, a member presale, a group coordinator, or box office. Exact seats receive one current channel assignment. Buyer access is authorized separately, and a buyer session may expose more than one allowed channel.

The result is one live seat truth for every authorized buyer and operator surface. If a seat sells, it cannot be sold again through another audience.

## The common allocation jobs are already inside the SDK.

Model the audience you serve, then choose how that audience reaches its seats. Your platform can keep checkout, payment, orders, tickets, customer records, and commercial rules.

### Protect a named seat pool.

Assign exact sponsor or VIP seats, issue a constrained route, and share a report for that channel without exposing the rest of the event.

### Distribute inventory without a copy.

Give a recurring partner its own scoped context in SeatLayer, or issue buyer access directly, while the event remains authoritative.

### Control access and price.

Expose one or more allowed channels through a scoped buyer session and apply only the price differences that audience should receive.

### Sell from the same event.

Let staff work through an authorized operator surface while public and private buyers continue to see live availability.

### Use the same five controls for every audience.

- Assign exact reserved inventory
- Override only audience prices that differ
- Authorize a buyer or staff route
- Freeze sales attribution at booking
- Share a one-channel report
- Release unsold seats with version checks

## From allocation to partner report.

The five capabilities work as one control loop. That is the use case—not five disconnected feature flags.

### Assign exact seats

Keep each seat in the event's only inventory and give it one current channel.

### Set audience differences

Override only the ticket prices that differ; otherwise inherit the base event price.

### Open a scoped route

Use staff access, a trusted-server-created buyer session, or a redeemable link.

### Record the seller

When a seat is booked, freeze the channel that produced the sale.

### Give the partner bounded access

Assign a role and explicit permissions for distribution, returns, requests, and reporting — on the partner's own account.

Open the allocation and access API reference →

## Choose access by trust level—not convenience alone.

Knowing a channel id never grants access. The route must carry authorization that matches the buyer or operator job.

Use the left and right arrow keys to move across the comparison columns.

| Access method | Best for | What it can expose | Security boundary |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Scoped buyer session | Signed-in buyers and integrated checkoutYour trusted server creates the browser session. | One or more allowed channels, with the exact buyer scope your application chooses. | Restrict by event, parent origin, allowed channels, and expiry. Keep account secrets server-side. |
| Hosted-access link | Sponsors, invited groups, and lightweight partner distributionNo account handoff is required. | One channel, optionally including public inventory, with quantity and session controls. | A bearer URL with expiry and redemption limits. Anyone holding a valid link can use it; rotate or revoke when needed. |
| Partner access | Recurring agencies, sponsors, schools, and resellersThe partner accepts with its own SeatLayer account; your channel appears as a context in its workspace switcher. | Only the assigned event and channel, plus organizer-enabled distribution, return, request, report, and CSV actions. | A membership checked on every request, with a Viewer, Coordinator, or Partner manager role. The organizer controls permissions, release date, and can revoke a person, the assignment, or the whole partner organisation. |
| Staff surface | Box office and event operationsAuthorized operators work inside a controlled surface. | The inventory and actions allowed by the staff session. | Use short-lived staff authorization and do not share an operator route as a buyer invitation. |

## Partner access: their own account, your one channel.

An agency, sponsor, school, or reseller works the allocation you assign — with its own SeatLayer account, inside a partner context that shows nothing else of yours.

_Invite once by email. The partner accepts with its own account, and your channel appears as a context in its workspace switcher._

_One account, two contexts. A partner keeps its own events and billing; the partner context carries only Overview, Allocations, Distribution, Reports, and Team._

_The boundary is enforced on the server on every request. Sibling channels, buyers, and your settings never enter a partner context._

| Role | Can |
| --- | --- |
| Viewer | See the assigned allocation, exact seats, attributed sales; export the CSV. |
| Coordinator | Viewer, plus the actions you enable: create and revoke buyer links inside your limits, return free seats against a reviewed version, request more inventory. |
| Partner manager | Coordinator, plus invite and remove teammates and change their roles. |

- Release date — still-free seats return to Public sale automatically, audited.
- Requests — allocate N free Public-sale seats straight from the partner's request, or decline.
- Revoke — a person, the assignment, or the whole partner organisation, immediately.

Read the partner access guide →

## Change a live allocation without guessing.

Allocation mutations are versioned and non-destructive. Preview the intended audience view, apply against the version you inspected, then reconcile the explicit result.

### Read and preview

Confirm the current assignment version and the exact seats the audience will see.

### Apply against that version

A stale version returns a conflict and moves nothing. Do not silently auto-retry a changed allocation.

### Inspect every result bucket

Held or booked seats stay protected; the response identifies moved and skipped labels.

Illustrative shape. Use the canonical API reference for current request and response fields.

## Current allocation and sales attribution answer different questions.

This distinction keeps partner reporting honest even when unsold seats are released to another audience later.

### Where is this seat assigned today?

Use current allocation to operate the on-sale event and decide which audience may reach unsold inventory.

- May change after review
- Held and booked seats are protected
- One current channel per exact seat

### Which channel produced this sale?

Attribution freezes the selling channel when the seat is booked, so later allocation changes do not rewrite the sale.

- Preserves historical channel result
- Can differ from current allocation
- Supports channel sell-through reporting

### Useful one-channel visibility.

- That channel's allocation and confirmed sales
- Search, filters, and CSV export
- Booked value only when you enable it
- A revocable read-only bearer route

### A deliberate privacy boundary.

- Buyer identities and active holds
- Booking references
- Sibling channels
- Event-wide totals

Why can sell-through exceed 100%? If a channel sold ten seats and its current allocation later shrinks to eight, attribution still records the ten real sales. That is expected—not a duplicate booking.

Recurring partner? Give it Partner access instead of sharing organizer credentials. Its context preserves the same one-channel reporting boundary and adds only the distribution, return, and request actions you explicitly enable.

Read the reporting and privacy contract →

## What this released capability is—and is not.

A precise boundary makes the SDK easier to buy and safer to implement.

### Use Sales Channels today for

- Exact reserved-seat allocations
- Public, sponsor, agency, presale, group, and box-office audiences
- Sparse audience-specific price overrides
- Scoped sessions and limited bearer links
- Versioned changes while sales are live
- Role-based partner access and scoped reports

### Do not model these as Sales Channels

- Season-ticket renewal or shared season entitlements
- First-class resale or seat upgrades/exchanges
- True partial-GA capacity splits between channels
- Partner-controlled pricing, arbitrary suballocations, or commission settlement
- Buyer identity or CRM inside a shared report
- A channel id used as authorization

Fixed multi-performance seat selection is separately released as Performance Groups. It is not a season, renewal-right, or resale system.

## Sales-channel questions, answered.

These answers describe the released exact-seat allocation contract reviewed on 22 August 2026.

### What is a ticket sales channel?

A ticket sales channel is a named allocation and attribution lane inside one event. It can represent public sales, a sponsor, an agency, a presale, or box office. A channel does not create a second copy of the chart or inventory.

### How do I reserve seats for a sponsor or partner without duplicating inventory?

Assign the exact seats to a sponsor or partner channel inside the existing event. The seats remain in the event's authoritative inventory, but only authorized buyer or staff surfaces can sell from that allocation.

### Can different audiences see different ticket prices?

Yes. A channel can apply sparse audience-specific price overrides. Seats without an override keep the event's base price, so the pricing model stays authoritative rather than becoming a copied price table.

### What is the difference between a scoped buyer session and a buyer link?

An authenticated buyer session is created by your trusted server and can expose one or more allowed channels for a buyer flow. A hosted-access link is a redeemable bearer URL for one channel, with expiry, redemption, quantity, and session limits. Anyone who possesses a valid bearer link can use it, so it must be handled like a ticket or invitation.

### How do recurring external partners get access?

An organizer grants Partner access on a private channel: it names the partner organisation, invites one person by email, and picks a Viewer, Coordinator, or Partner manager role with assignment-specific permissions. The partner accepts with its own SeatLayer account — no second login, no separate portal — and the channel appears as a partner context in its workspace switcher, next to its own workspaces. A Partner manager can invite teammates. The organizer can remove a person, the assignment, or the whole partner organisation at any time.

### Can a partner also run its own events on SeatLayer?

Yes. Partner access is a membership, not an account type. The same account keeps its own workspaces, events, floor plans, and billing, and switches into a partner context only to work the inventory another organizer assigned to it.

### What happens to a partner allocation at the release date?

If you set a release date on the assignment, whatever is still free in that channel returns to Public sale automatically at that moment, through the same versioned move an organizer would make by hand, and both sides see it in the audit trail. Held, booked, and blocked seats never move.

### Can I change allocations after an event goes on sale?

Yes. Allocation changes use a known assignment version. If that version is stale, the request fails and moves nothing. Held or booked seats are not moved, and the result reports which requested seats moved or were skipped.

### What happens to reporting when an allocation changes?

Allocation reports where inventory is assigned now. Attribution records the channel from which a seat was sold and is frozen at booking. A seat can therefore move later without rewriting the original selling-channel result.

### What can a shared partner report see?

A partner report is read-only and restricted to one channel. It can show that channel's allocation and sales, with booked value optional. It excludes buyer identities, active holds, booking references, sibling channels, and event-wide totals.

### Does knowing a channel id grant access?

No. A channel id is a label, not authorization. Private inventory requires an authorized staff surface, a trusted-server-created buyer session, a Partner access membership, or a valid hosted-access link.

### Can one seat belong to multiple channels?

An exact seat has one current channel assignment. An authorized buyer session may expose multiple channels, but the seat itself is not duplicated across them.

### Can SeatLayer split part of a GA capacity between channels?

Not in the current release. Sales-channel allocation is for exact reserved inventory; true partial-GA capacity splits between channels are outside the released contract.

### Do allocations, buyer links, and reports consume sold-seat credits?

No. Creating allocations, sessions, access links, and reports does not consume sold-seat credits. One credit is consumed when one seat is confirmed sold.

Capability source: SeatLayer's sales-channel model, channel API, and reporting contract.

## Bring one audience allocation into test mode.

Start with one sponsor, partner, presale, or box-office lane. Verify its seats, price, buyer scope, allocation change, and report before you expand the model.

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