Selling a ticket and scanning a QR code is the easy part. What sets ticketing apps apart is how they hold up on event day: the Wi-Fi drops at the gate, a guest arrives for the wrong time slot, or a few thousand people show up in the same hour. These are the things worth checking before you choose, along with how Event Ticketing handles each one.
Event-day scanning
Scanning without internet
Plenty of venues have patchy signal, from rural farms to basements to crowds that overload the cell towers. Check whether scanning keeps working when the connection doesn’t.
Event Ticketing: the Check In app for iPhone and iPad keeps scanning offline. Each scan is saved on the device and uploads when the connection comes back. Sync before the event so every device has the latest attendee list. Offline devices can’t see each other’s scans until they reconnect, so give each offline device its own entrance or line. See Installing the Check In app.
Scanning in Shopify POS
If your staff already sell at the door with Shopify POS, scanning in the same app means one device and one login.
Event Ticketing: tickets scan right inside Shopify POS. POS scanning needs a connection, so use the Check In app where signal is unreliable. See POS setup and Choosing a scanning app.
Turning away the wrong session
With timed entry, a 10am ticket shown at 2pm should be turned away, not let in.
Event Ticketing: set When can an attendee be checked in? to Within event start and finish, or 15 minutes before event starts to let guests in a little early. Scans outside that window are rejected. Expirations, day-of-week rules, and use limits cover multi-day and multi-use passes. See Scan validity rules and multi-use passes.
Duplicate scans
Event Ticketing: a ticket that’s already been checked in is flagged if it’s scanned again. Connected devices share check-ins as they happen, and offline devices catch up when they reconnect.
Selling
Timed entry and daily sessions
Event Ticketing: a recurring event creates daily or weekly sessions with set time slots and keeps a rolling window of days on sale. A multi-date event lets you add each session yourself. Every session has its own inventory or capacity, and if your hours change you can move a saved time slot, with sold tickets moving along with it.
Passes and memberships
Not every visit is tied to one date. Look for passes the buyer can use on any date, with rules for how often and when.
Event Ticketing: a pass works across every date of a multi-date or recurring event, and the buyer doesn’t pick a date at checkout. Each pass can set:
- Total uses, or unlimited.
- Uses per date, such as one entry a day.
- Allowed days of the week.
- An expiry, counted from purchase or from first scan.
Common setups:
- Season pass or membership: unlimited uses, one entry per day, expiring a year after purchase.
- Punch card: 10 total uses, one per day, so ten separate visits.
- Weekend pass: limited to Saturday and Sunday.
- Multi-day festival pass: one entry per day for each day of the festival.
- Open-date ticket: a single use on any date, good for gift tickets and presales before the schedule is set.
You can also collect a photo of each pass holder so staff can match the person to the pass at the door. See Choosing an event type and Scan validity rules and multi-use passes.
Large events
Shopify limits how many variants (each ticket type and date combination) one product can hold.
Event Ticketing: up to 2,000 variants per Shopify product. Bigger events are split automatically across linked products, grouped by hour, day, week, month, or year, and the storefront calendar works across all of them. See Choosing an event type.
Selling through an outage
Event Ticketing: your event data lives in Shopify, your storefront reads it from Shopify, and buyers check out with Shopify’s own checkout. If our servers are ever unavailable, customers can still browse and buy, and their tickets are issued as soon as service is back.
What buyers receive
Event Ticketing: PDF tickets with QR codes, plus Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes, delivered by email and on the order status page, in designs you control. See Apple Wallet setup and ticket delivery and Ticket delivery setup.
Pricing
Pricing for seasonal sales
Most organizers don’t sell evenly through the year. There are busy seasons and quiet months, so it’s worth comparing what each app would cost you over a full year rather than in a single month.
Event Ticketing: you pay a per-ticket fee when a ticket sells, and there’s a free plan with no monthly fee, so quiet months cost nothing. Paid plans lower the per-ticket rate if you sell steadily at higher volume. Free tickets don’t carry the per-ticket fee; they use credits instead. See Understanding your Shopify bill.
Platform and scale
Built for Shopify
Event Ticketing has Shopify’s Built for Shopify badge, which Shopify gives to apps that meet its standards for performance, design, and integration. It runs inside the Shopify admin, and your orders, products, checkout, and POS stay native to Shopify. See Built on Shopify.
Event Ticketing by the numbers
- 10 million+ paid tickets sold through Shopify.
- 100,000+ tickets sold in a single day, and more than 10,000 in a single hour.
- 17 million+ guests checked in.
- 150,000+ check-ins in a single day, and more than 18,000 in a single hour.
- 5,000+ guests checked in at a single event in one hour.
- Nearly 3 million tickets added to Apple Wallet.
