Selling entry tickets to your market

When charging entry makes sense

Gate entry works when the market is an outing — entertainment, food, atmosphere, a reason to stay two hours — and hurts when it's a shopping trip. A $2–5 ticket barely dents attendance at an event people planned for, but any gate at all suppresses the casual passer-by a weekly produce market lives on. If your stallholders' revenue depends on volume, keep the gate open and earn from stalls; if it depends on dwell time and occasion, a ticket can fund the occasion.

Ticketing also gives you numbers councils and sponsors take seriously: presold tickets are attendance you can prove before the day.

How it works on StallsApp

Every plan includes entry ticketing. You set ticket types and prices, and tickets sell from your market's public page — buyers get a QR code by email, no account needed, and your gate staff scan it on a phone at the gate. Each ticket admits once; a refunded ticket stops scanning. On the Pro plan, buyers can also add tickets to Apple and Google Wallet, which is worth having on the night your gate queue is long and everyone's phone is at 8%.

Ticket money follows the same rule as stall money: card payments settle to your own payment account, with our booking fee per transaction — which you can absorb, or pass to the buyer as its own line at checkout.

Price it like a market, not a concert

Cheap, round numbers move fastest at a gate: gold-coin-style pricing digitised. Kids free is nearly universal and worth advertising. Early-bird tiers work for event-style markets — they convert your promotion spike into committed attendance — and you can run tiered pricing on StallsApp by giving each price its own ticket type with an “until” date, so the early bird gives way to the door price on its own.

Publish your refund position with the tickets: for a day you cancel, refund in full — the goodwill outlasts the revenue, and shoppers who got their money back from a rained-out night come to the next one.

Promo codes and giveaways

A promo code gives a particular audience a reason to buy now: newsletter subscribers, a local radio station's listeners, a community group you're partnering with. Create one under Promo codes as a percentage or a dollar amount off, optionally limited to some ticket types or market days, with a start and end date and a maximum number of uses. Codes are never shown on your public page — buyers type them at checkout — and a refunded or abandoned order gives its use back. Give each partner its own code, and the code's uses tell you what that partnership sold.

For tickets you're handing out rather than selling — sponsors, volunteers, a radio competition — use Give away tickets on the Ticket sales page instead of a 100% code.

Sell through Eventbrite as a separate channel

Eventbrite can give shoppers another place to discover your market and buy tickets. Customers who buy there use Eventbrite's checkout, receive its tickets, and follow its payment and refund arrangements. Those orders do not appear in StallsApp's sales totals.

Where Eventbrite connections are available, an owner or admin can open Share & embed → List on Eventbrite, connect their own account, choose their Eventbrite organisation, and select a market date/session. Enter an Eventbrite quantity for each ticket type you want to offer, leaving the others at zero, then choose Create Eventbrite draft. If connections are not available, create the listing directly in Eventbrite.

The draft copies the date, times, description and selected single-day ticket types and prices once. Open it in Eventbrite to set the map location, upload artwork, and review prices, fees, sale windows, quantities and payout settings before publishing. Multi-day passes and promo codes need separate setup there. Any entry-time restriction is copied as text; Eventbrite scanning does not enforce StallsApp's admission rules.

After export, manage the listing in Eventbrite. Later changes and cancellations in StallsApp do not update it. If an export is interrupted, check the saved draft or follow the export-history instructions before trying again, so you do not create a duplicate event.

Split capacity and prepare both scanners

Allocate tickets between platforms before selling on both. For a 200-person event, you could set StallsApp's allocation to 150 and Eventbrite's to 50. Exporting 50 tickets does not reduce your StallsApp cap: change it yourself and account for tickets already sold or held. If several ticket types share the same venue capacity, their combined allocations must fit too.

To move unsold capacity between channels, reduce the allocation on one platform before increasing it on the other. Check each platform's current sales and reservations first. Sales, refunds and availability do not sync, so do not put the full remaining capacity on both platforms.

Prepare gate staff to use StallsApp's scanner for StallsApp tickets and Eventbrite's scanning tools for Eventbrite tickets. Handle Eventbrite refunds in Eventbrite and StallsApp refunds in StallsApp. A Facebook event that links directly to your StallsApp checkout needs only StallsApp's inventory and scanner.