The two pieces of the Event Ticketing app that live inside Shopify itself — the Point of Sale app and the checkout extension — both got a full rewrite under the hood this week, as part of our latest Built for Shopify renewal cycle.
The functionality is the same as merchants have been running for years. What changed is the foundation: both are now built on Shopify’s modern UI Extensions framework, which means they look and feel like a native part of the Shopify experience, load faster, and give us a much better surface to extend going forward.
Event Ticketing has been in the Built for Shopify program since Shopify first launched it in 2022. Renewing against the current standards (Built for Shopify 4.2.3) is what drove this round of modernization.
Point of Sale app
The POS app got the most visible rework. The interface was redesigned from the ground up to match Shopify POS’s own components, and the scan flow was tightened up:
- A Smart Grid tile that you can pin alongside your other POS actions, so the scanner is always one tap away
- A simplified scan view that shows attendee name, ticket type, event, and validity at a glance after each scan
- An order lookup screen that pulls up any Event Ticketing order from POS, with the tickets attached and check-in actions inline
- A post-purchase prompt after selling event tickets at the till, so staff can scan or check the customer in immediately without leaving the sale
- Better recovery from network blips and expired sessions so staff don’t get stranded mid-shift
If you used the previous POS app, the new version drops in as an upgrade — no reconfiguration required.
Checkout extension
A reminder of what this feature does, since it’s been a quiet workhorse since 2020 and we don’t talk about it often: the checkout extension surfaces the customer’s tickets directly on their Thank you page and on the Order status page they receive in the order confirmation email — so they can grab their tickets right after purchase without waiting for the email to arrive.
Each ticket exposes the actions the customer is most likely to want:
- Download the PDF
- Add to Apple Wallet
- Edit attendee details (name, custom fields) when registration is required
- Transfer the ticket to another person
- Exchange the ticket for another event, date, time, or ticket type
The original version of this feature was a ScriptTag back in 2020. It moved to a Checkout extension when Shopify made that available, and is now a Checkout UI Extension on the modern framework. Functionally identical, but visually cleaner and faster to load — and easier for us to keep in step with whatever Shopify ships next.
Bigger event-variant ceiling
Events with many dates, Tickets, or registration types can now support a higher variant cap per Shopify product. Festivals and multi-date series that previously had to split themselves across multiple products to fit will find more configurations consolidate cleanly into one.
A note for the curious
For anyone interested in the technical side: the rebuild moved both extensions onto Shopify’s UI Extensions framework (Preact + web components), and the embedded admin SPA’s bundling pipeline was migrated from Webpacker to esbuild. The merchant-visible upshot is faster page loads in the admin and lower-latency POS scans — the rest of it lives in the engineering trenches.