Event Ticketing is an app by Guest Manager that enables you to sell event tickets on your Shopify store. This includes generating and delivering scannable, branded and barcoded tickets to your customers, a mobile app to scan and validate tickets at the door, and more. We believe this is the future of selling tickets online, due to the lower cost compared to traditional ticketing companies, far superior marketing tools, control of your own brand, customers, and data, and finally, control over your money.

Our Shopify app is new (launched in October 2019), but we are not! We’ve been in business serving event organizers since 2011. We understand that timely and helpful support is paramount to your success. You can reach us at any time directly through the chat widget in the app, or email us at support@guestmanager.com. Thousands of large companies, festivals, and event producers rely on us every day to ensure their events are successful.

Take confidence in knowing that we will always be here, ready to support you during the integration phase, and knowing that we will continue to support your clients once the handoff is made.

Performance, scalability, and reliability is paramount. We have years of experience doing large festival ticketing onsales with our own ecommerce platform, where thousands of tickets are purchased in seconds. If we can handle the entire purchase experience end-to-end for large onsales - from loading the event page to processing the payment - then we can definitely take the smaller role of generating and delivering tickets with our Shopify integration. Trust Shopify to process your orders, and trust Event Ticketing to generate your tickets, and provide reliable onsite ticket scanning. Together, Shopify and Event Ticketing make the perfect platform for selling tickets online!

We are also working towards becoming a certified Shopify App (TBA)

Oh boy, I could write a book on the benefits of switching from a traditional ticket platform such as Eventbrite or Brown Paper Tickets, to Shopify + Event Ticketing. The key benefit are:

Upon completing this set up guide, you will have done:

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If you don’t yet have a Shopify account, please create one. Shopify offers a 90 free trial. Shopify is an ecommerce platform, and when paired with Event Ticketing, is the future of selling tickets online!

Navigate to the New event form. This can be accessed from Events in the main menu at the top, or from the Overview tab.

If you selected a multi-day event, you will see an additional section called Dates. Use this to add a time slot for each event. For example, if you have 10 time slots throughout the day, you would have 10 dates. If you are creating a tour with 5 dates over a few months, you will have 5 dates. The app will intelligently create variant options based on a time, date, and location. For example, if all Dates occur on the same day and at the same location (e.g. Jan 25th), then we will set up one dropdown total (option) for Time. If you create 5 dates across a few months, across different locations, we will create a dropdown for Date, and Location (location only if there are multiple events on the same day at different locations). Whew!

This next section is very important. Add a ticket for each price point. For example, you might add multiple tiers of General Admission tickets, and then another VIP or group package ticket.

Don’t worry, you can revisit this page at any time to edit, add, or remove tickets for sale.

Go ahead and click Save, and proceed to the next step: Customizing your PDF and Apple wallet tickets.

Let’s set up the downloadable ticket that customers will receive after purchasing tickets. You can set up both PDF and Apple wallet templates, and you’ll want to set up at least one - without it, customers can’t download tickets!

Setting up PDF tickets is a great opportunity to add another touchpoint for your brand, or sponsors. You have full control over adding graphics, text, and colors.

If you are subscribed to one of our paid plans, you can also setup and customize these templates directly from the Guest Manager app, which offer additional customizaton options such as disclaimers, content sections, field toggling, and more.

Benefits of paid plans for PDF tickets:

A PDF design will need to be setup in order to send scannable tickets to your customers.

From the event page, you will see a blue banner if you haven’t set up the design yet. Click “Set up” to begin.

Next you see a screen with two design options.

The custom style will let you have maximum control over the design, but you will need a graphic designer.

The standard style can be created without a designer, and looks very similar to an Apple wallet ticket.​

Red arrows have been drawn to illustrate which settings affect what.

Simply choose a banner image, pick colors, and click Update preview. The right side will refresh with a sample, along with a link to download a real sample.

Our clients have created stunning tickets using the custom design feature. This is how it works:

Custom template specifications

InstructionsDesign around the gray box. The gray box is where dynamic info will be inserted, such as the name, barcode, event info, etc. You may delete the gray box, it is there as simply a visual guideline on where it’s safe to edit.Ensure the barcode is not obstructed and has a clean white background and margin of at least a quarter inch. Once you design the ticket, it’s highly recommended to scan and test a sample ticket.

Apple wallet is a great way to provide more convenience to your customers, and increase scanning throughput at the event.

Go into the Customize section of the event, and click Set up for the Apple wallet design.

The system needs three graphic files to proceed:

For convenience, we’ve provided links to download samples for all three if you’d like to quickly try out the feature.

Once you’ve added the three graphics, choose colors and click Update preview.

Due to technical limitations, we cannot provide live previews of the wallet design, but you can preview it in two ways:

After customers complete the online purchase and arrive on the thank you page, they are presented with their tickets ready to download:

The app automatically hooks into the official Shopify checkout page for a seamless customer experience.

You can customize the text shown here, and other things, in the Settings section of the app.

You may also want to make small adjustments to the Shopify order notification email/SMS template, and the Point-of-sale notification template. The app hooks into the Shopify emails as opposed to sending our own. One less thing to customize, and one less email for the customer! Learn more about integrating with the Shopify notification templates here.

We’re strong proponents for keeping the checkout process as simple as possible. Therefore, we do not support collecting additional fields during the checkout process (don’t agree? Change our minds!). Having said that, you can collect additional info from attendees post purchase.

Coming soon. At the moment the app does not provide any features for styling the event page - this is up to you by editing the Online store and/or theme files in Shopify. Soon, the app will provide event page templates similar to what you’d see in other ticketing platforms: list each ticket option, quantity dropdown for each, and purchase.

You’ve made it this far! Our work in the Event Ticketing app is mostly done now. From now on, you interact primarily with the Shopify admin, as you are used to: creating draft orders, purchasing tickets on the storefront, managing orders, refunds, cancelations, etc - this all takes place in Shopify.

From the main events list:

Or from the event itself:

This page should look familar. It’s the product page in your Shopify admin. Since Event Ticketing creates standard shopify products, many of the same tools and editing capabilities you are used to are all available.

In general, it is safe to edit any content from the Shopify Admin (title, description, images, collection, etc). It is not safe to add or edit variant options, or add variants. All variants must be created by the Event Ticketing app, from editing the event and adding ticket tiers.

Make sure to set the product availability to Online store when you are ready to publish the event.

Warning! Do not change the Product type. The app relies on this to determine which orders are relevant to the app.

When editing the variants section, be very careful!

In order to checkout and test a ticket purchase, you need to publish the product to your online store.

Click Manage under the Product availability heading, enable the Online store, and don’t forget to save your unsaved changes:

Create a Draft Order in Shopify admin. Follow the Shopify help documentation for instructions.

Click the View button from the Product to get to the public storefront. Checkout and purchase the ticket product. Confirm that the “Download tickets” widget we added earlier shows up on the thank you confirmation page.

You can sell tickets using Shopify POS for iOS and Android. Don’t forget to customize the POS email/sms receipt, so when you send the customer their receipt, they will receive a link to download the tickets.

When an order is placed via the storefront, admin, or POS, the fulfillment will be automatically processed by the Event Ticketing app, based on your fulfillment preference in Settings.

The tracking link is immediately updated with a link to download the tickets. If the order is unfulfilled, then no tickets have been created yet.

We provide an iOS app for scanning tickets. It uses the camera on your phone to scan barcodes - no additional hardware is necessary! For large events, we also rent laser barcode scanners that plug into an iPod Touch. Get in touch for details. Generally, events under 400 or so attendees can use the camera scanner just fine. For larger or more professional events, I suggest taking a look at our barcode scanner rental program. It’s affordable, available in the USA, and we ship fast from our home base in Lake Tahoe, NV.

We do not have an Android app at this time. Unfortunately, Honeywell (the hardware vendor we use for laser scanners), does not offer an attachment for android phones. We put a lot of time and work into making our iOS check in app the best on the market (and we really believe it is). We suggest you to consider acquiring an iPod, iPhone, or iPad to use for ticket scanning. If you are interested in an app for Android, please get in touch. If acquiring an iOS device is not an option, we do at least offer web-based check in under one of the paid plans, Premium or Business.

From the Overview page of the app, look for the section on the Check In App. There is an access code, PIN, and link to download the app. Follow the instructions to install the app from the Apple App Store. We also offer a check in app for Mac, too.

Don’t have an Apple device? See our note above.

This is a quick overview, for more detail please refer to the article for the check in app.

Pro Tip If you want to test out the iOS app without going through all of the above, there is a Test Drive mode in the app. You can even punch an email into the app to get a few sample tickets emailed to you for testing.

When your event is over, you will be emailed a link to view the check in report (Premium and Business plans only). You can then export a list of attendees, if desired.

If you are a large shop and are interested in tailoring custom features or workflows for your processes, contact us for details.

How can we improve? Let us know your ideas on new features, and improving existing ones!

View this article in the Guest Manager Help Docs