Sell event tickets

Your marketplace can work as a simple ticket shop for concerts, workshops, classes or tours. Organisers post a listing with the event date and the number of tickets, buyers pay with Buy Now, and the listing shows as sold out when the last ticket is gone. Once the event has passed, the listing disappears from your category pages and search results by itself.

Set it up

Go to Listings › Custom Fields and create a field with the Name eventdate (exactly this, in lower case), the Type Date and a Label such as Event date. Choose the categories it applies to, or none for all.
Switch on Buy Now with a method that pays organisers: Stripe Connect, PayPal’s Buy Now button or the eWallet. See Let members sell with Buy Now.
Go to Settings › Payments, switch on Stock Control under Pay to post and click Save changes. Organisers can then set the number of tickets in In Stock. See Stock control.

Organisers now pick the event date when they post. Each sale takes the number of tickets bought off the stock; at zero, the listing is marked as Sold.

What happens with the date

As soon as an eventdate field exists on your site:

Past events are hidden. Listings whose event date has passed no longer appear in category pages and search results. Listings with no event date aren’t affected.
Sort by date. In Listings › Settings › Listing pages, set Sort Listings to Event date to list the soonest events first. With this sort, only listings that have an event date are shown.
Calendar. A calendar of upcoming events is available at /calendar.html on your site. Add it to your menu so visitors can find it. Repeating events show on each of their dates.

Repeating events

A weekly market, a monthly meet-up or a yearly festival doesn’t need a new listing each time. With the Repeats field, the organiser posts the event once and it moves on to its next date by itself.

Two fields make an event repeat:

Field	What it does
Repeats	Every week, Every month, Every year, or Does not repeat (to switch it back to a one-off event).
Repeats until	The last day the event happens on. Leave it empty for no end.

The fields are part of the business directory fields:

New directory sites that have the event date field get them.
Other sites: go to Listings › Custom Fields and use the Directory template under Start from a template. It adds the directory fields you don’t have yet, including these two, and leaves the ones you have as they are. Delete any you don’t want.

What happens with a repeating event:

It moves on by itself. Every night, a repeating event whose date has passed moves to its next date (and its end date, if it has one, by the same amount). It stays in your listings, search and calendar as an upcoming event.
Months of different lengths. A monthly event on the 29th, 30th or 31st falls on the last day of shorter months.
When it ends. Once its Repeats until date has passed, the event is hidden like any past event.
The calendar shows its later dates in the month too, not only the next one.

Add to calendar

On a site with directory mode on, an upcoming event’s listing shows a box with its Next date (and time, if it has one), how it repeats, for example Every week until 31 December 2026, and an Add to calendar link. The link downloads the event as a calendar file that Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook open. A repeating event goes into the visitor’s calendar with all its dates.

What buyers get

After paying, the buyer receives the ads-purchased email with the order number and listing details. Yclas doesn’t generate tickets with barcodes; the order number serves as proof of purchase. To send entry details, add a buyer_instructions field (see Special-purpose fields): its text is included in the email, for example Show this email at the door. Doors open at 7 pm.

Organisers see who bought tickets in My Sales.

Tips

Create a separate Events category and attach the eventdate field only to it, so other listings don’t ask for a date.
If your whole site is about events, make Event date the default sort.
Free events work too: with no price, the listing has no Buy Now button and works as a normal listing.

Let members sell with Buy Now — payments to organisers, stock and quantities.
Custom fields — creating the date field.
Menu and footer links — add the calendar link.
Run a business directory — the directory fields, including venue and event end date.