Setting up an event
Group your event tickets into categories buyers can read
Put your ticket types into named groups, so a buyer choosing between four days and three price tiers reads twelve tickets under four headings they recognise on an ordinary event page.
- For
- Anyone selling an event with more ticket types than fit on a page
- Takes
- 5 minutes
What you need before you start
- You are an owner or an admin on this event. The Tickets screen is where every part of this lives.
- Your event has the ticket types you want to group. Making a category does not make a ticket, and an empty category shows a buyer nothing.
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Make a category for each group a buyer chooses between
Open your event, go to Tickets, and find Ticket Categories. Select Create, type a Category Name a buyer would recognise, and select Create Category. Name them after the choice somebody makes, such as a day of your festival or a part of your venue, rather than after your price tiers.
The dashboard checks the name against the ones already on the event, ignoring capitals, so
Friday
andfriday
count as the same name. It saysA category with this name already exists
before it saves rather than after. Two people naming a category at the same instant can still get past it, so rename one of the pair if you ever see a name twice.
Tickets, Ticket Categories. -
Put each ticket type into its category
A category holds nothing until you say what goes in it, and that is done on the ticket type rather than here. Open a ticket type on the same screen, find Ticket Category, and pick the one it belongs to. No category is the starting point for every tier, and leaving it there keeps the tier in the main list.
The field is on the form for an ordinary ticket type. A table type's form does not show it, and neither does a tier on an event that takes its prices from a distributor. Fai can still put either into a category for you.
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Choose what a re-listed ticket becomes
Resale Type is the second field on a category, and it decides which of that category's tiers a ticket turns into when somebody passes it on. Current Tier makes it the first tier in the category that still has tickets, or the last one when they have all sold out. Final Tier always makes it the last tier.
This setting is read on one path only: an event with the categorised waiting list turned on, for a resale that reached the buyer through a waiting list invitation. Every other resale keeps the tier the ticket was bought as, whatever the category says, so read this as the waiting list's pricing rule rather than your event's. Where it is read, it picks from every tier in the category and reads nothing else about the one it lands on, so keep a category to tiers that can stand in for each other.
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Rename or remove one
Select a row, or Edit on it, to change the name or the resale type. The trash button removes a category, and the dashboard names the one it is about to remove before you confirm.
Removing a category leaves every ticket type that was in it, and their sales, exactly as they are. What goes is the grouping, so those tiers return to the main list for a buyer.
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Look at your event page the way a buyer does
Open your event page and read down the tickets. Each category holding a tier this buyer can see is a heading with those tiers under it, and a tier left on No category keeps its place in the list with no heading over it.
A tier already carrying a Ticket Group, or named in the
[Something] Name
style, shows that heading instead: clear the one that is winning before the category can take it. A category whose tiers are all hidden, or that nothing has joined, does not appear.
Or have it done for you
Fai, the assistant inside your dashboard, can do the whole job: make the categories, put each ticket type into one, and tell you what is left over. She asks you to approve every change before she makes it. Your own AI assistant over our MCP server cannot, because that server has no ticket category tool.
In your dashboard, with Fai
Make ticket categories called Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Full Weekend on this event. Then list my ticket types, put each one in the category its name points at, and tell me which are in none of them.
Questions you might have
- Do categories change what a ticket costs?
- No. Each ticket type keeps its own price, allocation and sale dates. A category groups them for whoever is choosing, and the one thing it decides is what a re-listed ticket becomes on the waiting list path.
- What happens to a ticket type I never put in a category?
- It goes on selling exactly as it did. No category is where every tier starts, and an event where none of them moves looks to a buyer the way it always has.
- Does duplicating my event bring the categories?
- Yes. A duplicate carries every category with its name and its resale type, and the copied tiers keep their places in them. An event with time slots offers a Ticket Types box on the duplicate dialog, and unticking it copies neither the tiers nor their categories.
- Why does my time-slot event show no category headings?
- A time-slot event builds its headings from its time-slot groups instead, so the categories you set never reach that page. They still hold your tiers together in the dashboard, and on an event running the categorised waiting list they still decide what a re-listed ticket becomes.
- Can a category hold tiers from two time slots?
- It can, and on an event running the categorised waiting list that is worth avoiding. Resale Type picks a tier from anywhere in the category without reading the time slot or the table setting on it, so a ticket sold for the 2pm slot can come back as the 10am one, and a seat can come back as a table. Give each slot its own category, and keep tables out of a category holding seats.
- Can one ticket type be in two categories?
- No. Each ticket type holds one category at a time, so picking a second one replaces the first. Where you want a tier to appear in two places, that is two ticket types.
- Why does my category show no tickets?
- Nothing has been put in it. Making a category and naming it does not move any ticket type, so open each tier that belongs in it and set its Ticket Category.
Where to go from here
Do this on your own event
Create your account, build your event, and follow these steps in your own dashboard. No sales call first.