A productive year on the heels of the January performance and design update. 2021 brought a long list of new merchant-facing features — pickups, customer-facing ticket editing, customizable booking fees, large-event support, deeper Shopify order editing — and the usual stream of polish, performance work, and platform updates.
New features
Pickups. A new ticket type for at-event pickups — name badges, swag, festival wristbands, anything the customer needs to physically collect on arrival. Pickups appear in the Check In app’s scan flow alongside regular tickets, and merchants can configure pickup locations and rules per event.
Customer-facing ticket editing. Customers can now edit their own ticket details (attendee name, custom fields) from a self-service ticket viewer page after purchase. Cuts down on “can you change my name on this ticket” support emails.
Customizable booking fees. Per-event configuration of booking, service, and other fees, alongside the existing flat-fee setup — useful for tiered events that charge different fees by ticket class.
Recurring events refinements. The recurring-event model picked up an hour option, fixes to recurrence rule handling, and better support for events that span unusual cadences.
Large event support. A series of optimizations to how the app handles events with very high ticket counts — better queryperformance for festival-scale stores, improved sync, and tuned background jobs to keep up under load.
Ticket fields, expanded. Extra capabilities on custom ticket fields, including additional input types and improved interactions with Shopify metafields. Fields can now also be surfaced on Apple Wallet passes.
Allow add guests. A merchant-facing preference (later expanded in 2023) that lets customers add additional attendees during ticket registration.
Shopify integration deepens
Order editing mutations and workflow. Shopify launched their order-editing API early in 2021, and we plumbed it through to Guest Manager so edits made on the Shopify side (adding line items, changing addresses, refunds) flow through to the underlying event order automatically.
Variant metafield date support. Added so events with date-specific variants (e.g. one-night-of-many in a tour) can carry their per-variant date in Shopify metafields cleanly.
Webhook handling refresh. Several rounds of refinement to how the app processes Shopify webhooks — better dedupe, improved error recovery, and support for more recent webhook payload shapes.
Shopify Admin API version bumps. The app keeps current with Shopify’s quarterly API releases.
Apple Wallet and PDF tickets
- Custom fields can now appear on Apple Wallet passes
- Pass details became editable post-issue (so a name correction propagates to the wallet pass)
- A handful of fixes around voided passes and pkpass generation reliability
Reporting and analytics
A reporting overhaul in late September added improved check-in, pickup, product, and ticket reports — with cleaner formatting and better filtering. Counts and stats throughout the embedded admin were cached for noticeably faster page loads.
Internationalization
Translations expanded substantially across Q3 and Q4 — additional languages added, several locale fixes, and a handful of zh (Chinese) rendering issues sorted out.
Reliability, performance, and polish
A sustained focus on internal quality through the year:
- N+1 query elimination across the embedded admin and the Tickets dashboard
- Counter caching on hot pages — fewer aggregate queries running per request
- Spam controls on inbound merchant signup forms
- Intercom support tooling revamped — better context for support conversations and ticket lookups
- ScriptTag refactor — cleaner architecture for the storefront-side ticket viewer
Annual maintenance
The Apple Wallet signing certificate was rotated, as it is every year by Apple’s design — existing wallet passes continue to validate without merchant action.
Check In iOS app
The iOS Check In scanner shipped a series of patch releases through 2021 (3.4.6, 3.4.7, version 3.x maintenance, 3.5.4) — bug fixes and accessory tweaks on top of the v3.x interface that landed in 2020.