If you sell tickets, you already know the same seat is not worth the same to everyone. The regular who buys two months out is doing you a favor, and a lower price is how you say thank you. The person who wants the front table on the night will happily pay more for it. Everybody else lands somewhere in between.
A ticketing marketplace will happily price an event that way for you. The cost is a slice of every sale, a checkout that happens on somebody else’s site, and an attendee list you get back later as an export.
Say hello to ticket types
You can give a single event as many kinds of tickets as it needs, each with its own name, description, price and capacity. Your visitors see them listed together on the event page, pick the ones they want, and pay for all of it in one checkout on your own site.
Plenty of Sugar Calendar Events users told us they needed exactly this, on our feedback form and on our feature-request board, in words like different prices and quantities for the same event.
Reward the people who buy early
An early-bird rate only works if it can run out. Put a capacity on that tier and the next buyer pays the standard price once it is gone, without you watching the numbers or editing the event at midnight.
Each tier counts down on its own. A description sits under every name, so “Early Bird” can say it is limited and your top tier can spell out what the extra money buys, right where somebody is deciding rather than in a line of small print further down the page.
Sweet pricing for every kind of attendee
Your best seats are worth more, and now you can ask for it. Put a small premium tier above your standard price, describe what comes with it, and let the people who want it take it.
Because every tier is priced separately, one night can carry a discount, a standard rate and something better without turning into three separate listings on your calendar.
One checkout, however many tiers they pick
Nobody is restricted to one tier per order. A family taking two adult seats and two child seats buys all four in one go and pays once, and the checkout keeps track of which ticket is which.
Know who bought what before the doors open
Every ticket the order issues carries the tier it was sold as. Open the order and you get a row per ticket with its code, its attendee and its ticket type together.
This is the part I like most, and it is the bit that pays you back on the night. Whatever your top tier promised, the good seats or a drink on arrival, you can see at a glance who is entitled to it.
What this looks like for a comedy night
Say you run a monthly standup night in a bar that seats fifty.
You put Advance at $18 for the first nine seats, Standard at $25 for the thirty five after that, and Front Table at $60 for the last six, which comes with a drink on arrival. All three sit on one event page with their prices and remaining counts.
The early tier sells out in two weeks and closes itself. The standard tier keeps selling. Six regulars take the front table. On the night you open the order and know exactly who is sitting down the front.
No second listing, no marketplace fee, and nobody had to leave your site to pay.
Who this is for
If you sell tickets to anything with more than one price on the door, this one is for you. A few people who will feel the difference right away:
- Comedy and music promoters who want the early crowd to pay less than the people who decide on the day.
- Gig and concert organizers selling a floor price alongside a smaller run of better seats.
- Workshop hosts who open with an early rate and switch to a standard one once it goes.
- Conference organizers running early, standard and late pricing on a single date.
- Agencies and freelancers setting up an events site for a client who will want to add a tier later without calling you.
Set up your tiers in a few minutes
1. Switch on Event Ticketing
Ticket types come with the Event Ticketing addon. In your WordPress dashboard, open Events » Addons and make sure Event Ticketing is activated.
2. Turn on ticket sales for the event
Open the event, go to the Tickets tab in the Event panel, and switch Ticket Sales on. Selling tickets needs Stripe connected under Events » Settings » Payments first, and the ticketing documentation walks through that connection if you have not done it yet.
3. Name and price your first tier
Give it a name your visitors will recognize, a description that earns the price, and the price itself. Then turn on Limit Capacity and set how many you are willing to sell at that rate.
4. Add the tiers underneath it
Select Add Another Ticket and repeat. Each row keeps its own price and its own capacity, so a capped early tier sits happily alongside a standard tier with a much bigger allocation.
5. Publish and look at it as a visitor
Save the event and open its public page. Every tier should be listed with its price, its description and its remaining count, each with its own quantity box. If you want to rehearse a purchase before you go live, test-mode payments let you run the whole checkout without taking real money.
Running a series? Every date sells its own tickets
For a recurring event, the Tickets tab adds a Unique per Occurrence switch, which sells separate tickets for each occurrence. Each date in the series gets its own page with its own ticket box and its own checkout, so a monthly night is not sharing one pot of tickets with next month.
Already included on Plus, Pro and Elite
Ticket types come with the Event Ticketing addon, which is included on the Plus, Pro and Elite plans. If you are on one of those, it is already waiting on your site. You will want to be running Sugar Calendar Events 3.12.0 or later.
Addons start at Plus, so if you are on Basic today, moving up is what brings ticket types with it. The pricing page lays out what each plan includes, and our 14-day money-back guarantee means you can set your tiers up and run a real event on them with our blessing.
Why this matters
Pricing is one of the few levers you fully control. The same room on the same night is worth different amounts to different people, and being able to say so is often the difference between a night that turns a real profit and one that barely covers the room.
Tiered pricing has long been the sort of thing you went to a marketplace for, cut and off-site checkout included. Now it is just something your own event page does, on the site you already own, with your attendee list staying where you can see it.
Start above your current price
If you sell everything at one price today, the easiest first move is not a discount. Leave your current price exactly where it is and add one tier above it: a handful of the best seats, a table down the front, something that comes with an extra. The people who would happily have paid more now can, and nobody who was already going to buy at your standard price pays you less.
That is the whole experiment. If the top tier sells, you have found money you were leaving on the table. If it does not, you are no worse off than you were, and you know something about your audience that you did not know last month.
Thanks to the organizers who kept telling us what they needed here. You were specific about it, which made this a straightforward one to build. If your pricing needs something we have not got to yet, our feature request page reaches the team directly.
Gregor Capuder
Product Manager
Frequently asked questions
Add as many as the event needs. Three is a common setup: a discounted tier, a standard one, and a premium one.
Yes. They set a quantity against each type they want and pay once for the whole basket. Each ticket in the order keeps its own type.
Yes. Open the order and each issued ticket is listed with its code, its attendee and its ticket type.
No. Ticket sales and RSVP are alternatives for a given event, and the event editor will tell you so if both are switched on. Use ticketing when you are taking payment and RSVP when you are counting heads.
Yes. Turn on Unique per Occurrence in the Tickets tab, and each date in the series sells its own tickets on its own page.
