-deprecated- Product Change Notifications: Managing Sale Status Updates

Introduction

At Tiqets, we know how important it is for your platform to reflect what’s actually available for booking. Our Product Change Notification (PCN) system helps you stay in sync when a product becomes unavailable or is made available again after a closure.

Each notification includes helpful context: the reason for the change, an estimated reopening time frame, and a suggested fallback product you can promote. This allows you to keep your catalog accurate, avoid promoting unavailable options, and continue offering relevant alternatives.

Staying up to date improves the customer experience and helps you avoid wasting marketing efforts and budget for products that can’t be booked.

This guide explains how to receive and respond to product status updates using PCN.

Before you start, please make sure you have reviewed our Signing Guide as signing is required to securely use Product Change Notifications.

📅 When is a Product Status Notification Sent?

You’ll receive a notification when a product’s sale status changes. This typically means:

• A product that was available for booking becomes unavailable

• A previously unavailable product becomes available again

These events are identified in the notification as a checkout change type.

{
  "product_id": 313373,
  "change_types": ["checkout"],
  "reason": "temporary_closure",
  "reopening_date": "within_7_days",
  "alternative_product_id": 555789
}

To help you manage the change effectively, the notification may also include additional context:

• reason: explains why the product is no longer available (temporary_closure, out_of_season, or other)

• reopening_date: gives an estimate of when the product might return (within_7_days, within_2_weeks, within_month, or more_than_month)

• alternative_product_id: suggests another product that’s still available and relevant and that can be temporarily used as a replacement of the initial product.

When a product becomes available again, you'll receive another Product Status Notification, but then the reason , reopening_date and alternative_product_id fields will be set to null.

Notification delays

Notifications are not sent instantly. The change notifications for multiple products will be held for several minutes to avoid spamming you when multiple mutations are being done to the same product. Only the last mutation of the same type will be sent to you.

🛠️ How to Handle the Notification

When a product status change is detected, Tiqets sends a POST request to your specified endpoint. This request contains a JSON payload like the one shown earlier.

Your system should be prepared to:

1. Acknowledge the notification Return an HTTP 200 response to confirm successful delivery. If your server does not respond with a 200 status code, Tiqets will retry the notification using exponential backoff: after 20, 40, 80, 160, and 320 seconds. Note: the response body is ignored; only the HTTP status code matters.

2. Update your catalog based on the notification The notification payload contains all the information needed to update the product’s sale status immediately. You should deactivate products that became unavailable, and when an alternative_product_id is provided, consider promoting the suggested fallback product to maintain your conversion flow and avoid losing sales.

3. Use the additional context to plan ahead You can also make use of the following fields to improve your catalog management:

   • reason: Optionally display or log why the product is unavailable (e.g., seasonal closure, maintenance).

   • reopening_date: Plan when to relist the product based on its expected return timeframe.

📨 Subscribing to Product Change Notifications

To start receiving product status updates, you need to create a subscription. Subscriptions define which products you want to monitor and where Tiqets should send the notifications.

How it works

You can manage your subscriptions using the Tiqets API. Each subscription specifies:

• A target_endpoint: the URL where Tiqets will send notifications

• A list of product_ids: the specific products you want to monitor

You can create one or multiple subscription lists. For example, you might want separate subscriptions for your different markets, or to separate high-priority and low-priority products.

Subscriptions are general: you will receive all product change notifications for the selected products. To detect sale status changes specifically, you need to check for notifications with the checkout change type.

You can see the different methods available for the subscriptions endpoint in the APIs Reference

Creating a subscription

POST /v2/subscriptions/

{
  "name": "Important product list one",
  "subscription_type": "webhook",
  "target_endpoint": "https://partner/notification/url",
  "products": [
    {
      "product_id": 973888
    },
    {
      "product_id": 973666
    },
    {
      "product_id": 929249
    }
  ]
}

After creating the subscription, you will start receiving notifications for the selected products. Among these notifications, the ones with the checkout change type specifically indicate a change in the product’s sale status.

If you encounter any issues processing notifications, such as missing updates or unexpected retries, feel free to contact our technical support team. We’re here to help you build a reliable and efficient integration.