Selling entry tickets to your market
Updated 27 August 2026
Most markets are free to enter, and should be — foot traffic is the product you sell stallholders. But night markets, festival markets and big seasonal events increasingly charge at the gate, and a few dollars a head across a good crowd can out-earn the stall fees. The mechanics are the easy part; the decision is the hard one.
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 Stripe 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 putting time limits on a ticket type's price.
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.
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