Running events
Your events calendar — one-off and recurring, free and ticketed. Create the event here and it appears on your storefront calendar; customers book (and pay, if it's ticketed) from there.
The tabs across the top split the calendar into One-off Events, Recurring Events and Past Events, each showing how many people are booked on each event; pick one to edit it. One-off and recurring events are listed in time order, soonest first: a one-off by when it starts, a series by the next night it runs. The box above each list filters it by event name. Add new Event opens a blank form, and Settings holds the options that apply to every event, and a link to the shop's opening hours and closed days. If your plan includes posting to Facebook, a Facebook tab sits beside it — see Events ▸ Facebook.
The fields
| Field | What to put in it |
|---|---|
| Title | What it's called. "Friday Night Magic", "Pokémon League". |
| Slug | Optional — the web address it lives at. Leave it blank and it's made from the title, which is almost always what you want. |
| Description | What a player needs to know before turning up: format, doors, entry, what's included. |
| Type | Community (store-run) — your own event, bookable, and the only kind that can be scored in the league. General (listing only) — something you're advertising but not running: a regional, someone else's tournament. |
| Price | Ticket price. Leave blank for a free event — free events still take bookings, they just skip payment. |
| Sell early bird tickets | Tick it and two fields appear: Early bird price and Last early bird day. Up to the end of that day a ticket costs the early price; from midnight it costs the full Price above. The early price has to be below the full one, and an event needs a Price to have an early bird at all. Shoppers see the early price with the full one struck through and the date it ends; a ticket already in a basket reprices if the deadline passes before they pay. Untick the box and the full price returns for everyone. |
| VAT on tickets | Standard rate for almost every event. Leave it there unless your accountant tells you the event is one of the few that are exempt. |
| Max attendees | The capacity. Once it's reached, further customers join a waitlist instead of being turned away — see below for what happens when a place frees up. Leave blank for unlimited. |
| Header image | A 16:9 picture for the event page. Crop it in place after uploading. |
| Published | Ticked, the event is live on the storefront. Untick it to save the event as a draft — shoppers cannot see it or book it while you write it — or to retire an old one without deleting its history. Drafts show a Draft badge in the list. |
One-off or recurring
Ticking Recurring event swaps the date fields for a recurrence rule.
- Frequency — weekly, every 2 weeks, or monthly.
- Days — tick the day(s) it runs on.
- Start time / End time — the same clock time every week.
- Series start — when the run begins. Series end is optional; leave it blank for "until further notice", which is what a weekly night usually is.
A recurring event is one event with many nights, not a hundred copies. Bookings, the capacity and the attendee list are all per night, so this week being full doesn't touch next week.
Unticked, you get a plain Starts and optional Ends instead — for a prerelease or a one-off tournament.
Nights it doesn't run
Two different tools, and the difference matters.
Skipped dates, inside a recurring event, take one night off that event and leave everything else alone. Commander is off this Friday because the room is booked; Pauper still runs.
Closed days, set with your opening hours on the General tab of Settings (the Events Settings tab links there), shut the whole shop for a date — a prerelease weekend, Christmas. Nothing runs: every event vanishes from the calendar and no ticket can be bought for that day, one-off events included. That last part is the reason to reach for it rather than skipping a date on each event in turn.
Neither one cancels bookings that already exist, and neither refunds anybody. If people have booked and you need them gone, the page tells you how many and you cancel them yourself from Attendees — deliberately, so nobody's paid ticket disappears without you deciding it should.
Attendees
Attendees lists who's booked, per date, with their booking reference and what they paid. Cancel releases the place.
For a recurring event, each date has its own block, newest date first. Dates that have already passed are hidden; Show past dates under the blocks brings them back, and Hide past dates puts them away again.
Add an attendee only offers dates from today onwards. A date that has passed can't be booked, so a one-off event that has already happened has nothing to book onto.
The waitlist is a race, not a queue
This is the part worth understanding, because it is not what people assume — and it is what you will be explaining to a customer.
When you cancel a confirmed booking, everyone on the waitlist is emailed at once, and the toast tells you how many — "2 waitlister(s) notified". Each email carries a claim link, and the first person to follow theirs gets the place. They see Place confirmed and a reference of their own.
Anyone who follows their link afterwards is told "that space was just claimed by someone else". Their link stays live and they stay on the list, so the next place that opens reaches them too. Nobody is quietly dropped for losing a race.
It is deliberately not a queue: a strict queue means the place sits empty while the person at the top is asleep, and a shop night filled the same evening is worth more than one filled fairly. But it does mean you should never tell a waitlister they are "next" — tell them to watch their email and be quick.
Only cancelling a confirmed booking from this screen sets that off. A refund, a customer cancelling from their own account, or an unpaid hold expiring all free the place without offering it to anyone. If you want the waitlist worked, cancel the booking here.
Translations
If you sell in more than one language, the tabs at the bottom let you write the title and description again per language. Anything you leave blank falls back to the main text above.
VAT — which case are you?
- If you are VAT registered (a VAT number and its Registered from date are saved in Settings ▸ Payment ▸ Tax): the ticket price is treated as VAT-inclusive like every other price, at the rate set in VAT on tickets, and the VAT inside it appears on your VAT report with your other sales. A ticket is always taxed at your own country's rate, because the event happens in your shop, even when the buyer lives abroad or the same order ships goods overseas.
- If you are not VAT registered: no VAT is charged or recorded, and the player pays exactly the ticket price you set.
Good to know
- Deleting an event deletes its bookings too, and it asks first. To stop running something, untick Published instead.
- A ticket is a normal basket line — a player can buy an event ticket and a booster box in one go, and it appears on one order.
- The toggle at the top of the page puts today's events on your home page, which is worth having on if you run something most nights.