Why using Shopify to sell events doesn’t work (a story about turnips)
By Kelsey Gilbert-Kreiling | Co-founder, Eventually
A t-shirt sale is finished when the box ships. A class begins with the sale: it has a date, a room with a limit, a guest in every seat, and people you'll want to see again. Ecommerce tools built for t-shirts handle the payment well and leave the rest to you, which is why so many hosts end up rebuilding it by hand.
Product checkout is built around things a class never needs: shipping, sizes, returns, and restocks. Meanwhile, it's missing what every class depends on:
A start time, in the right time zone
A capacity shared across every ticket price
A guest for every ticket, not just a buyer
A waitlist for when it fills
A reminder a day or two before
A check-in at the door
A reason to come back, and a way to invite them
When your tool doesn't know about those things, you have to become the system that does. In about 30 interviews with people who sell classes, workshops, and events, we heard two patterns again and again:
Selling gatherings like products
Classes go into an online store as products, with dates as variants.
What works: Checkout happens on your own site, in your brand.
What breaks: Capacity is tracked per variant, guest details arrive one name per order, and reminders, waitlists, and check-in all happen by hand.
Selling every event like a music festival
Events go on a ticketing platform built for discovery, where shoppers browse many events at once.
What works: Reminders, check-in, and guest lists come built in.
What breaks: Guests leave your site to buy, your brand gives way to the platform's, and a per-ticket fee applies even to guests who found you through your own Instagram or newsletter.
The turnip story
One of our customers is a truffle farm in the US. Among the things they sell are tickets to truffle hunts. The owner summed up the problem in one line: "I'm selling Truffle Hunt tickets like a turnip. They are not a turnip."
It's the most accurate description of this problem we've heard. A turnip gets picked, priced, and sold, and once it's paid for, the job is done. A truffle hunt happens at a set time, for a limited group, and the sale is only the beginning.
Swap in a pottery class, a supper club, a sound bath, or a weekly meditation group, and the same thing holds.
Five Signs you're selling tickets like turnips
You rebuild the guest list in a spreadsheet before every class.
You copy the same product every week and change the date.
You send reminders by hand, or not at all.
Friends of group buyers arrive as strangers.
Your sold-out page doesn't point anywhere.
How to fix it with the tools you have.
If you don’t want to leave a traditional ecommerce platform like Shopify for your event ticketing, here are a few things you’ll want to do:
Set capacity carefully. Make sure every ticket price counts against the real number of seats in the room.
Collect every guest's name. Even a follow-up form after purchase beats one name per order.
Schedule a day-before reminder. One reusable template covers most of what guests need to know.
Add a waitlist to popular classes. Squarespace product waitlists are a reasonable start.
Keep one calendar page. Every upcoming date in one place, linked from your bio and newsletter.
Treating events like events
Eventually is event ticketing for calendar-centric businesses, built as a Squarespace-first extension. Events still sell through Squarespace Commerce on your own site, with checkout through Squarespace Payments or Stripe. What changes is everything around the sale: capacity shared across ticket types, details for every guest, waitlists, reminders, QR check-in, and recurring schedules.
KP (Karthik Puvvada), the Product Hunt hunter who has helped launch close to 200 startups and who hunted Eventually, put the premise in one line: ecommerce "was built for shipping products, not gathering people."
The businesses using it look nothing like a store catalog. A Lisa Frank-themed cookie decorating class in Chicago. A founder speaker series in South Florida. A weekly Sangha in Santa Barbara. A rehearsal observation with a dance company in West Palm Beach. A block printing workshop in West Bethel, Maine.
What to do right now
If you sell a few one-off events a year: Your store may be enough. Add a reminder and a way to collect every guest's name.
If you run a weekly or monthly schedule: Add up the hours you spend each month on guest lists, copied products, and reminders.
If you sell on a discovery platform: Ask your last 20 guests how they found you.
If you design sites for event clients: Ask where their guests come from before you choose a tool.
The bottom line
A turnip is finished the moment it sells. A truffle hunt is just getting started.
If your business gathers people at a place and time, your tools should know the difference.
Keep reading:
→ Calendar-centric selling, defined
→ Eventually vs Shopify: Selling Event Tickets on the Right Platform
See it in action:
→ Every kind of calendar-centric business
Sell your classes like classes
Capacity, guest details, reminders, and check-in for every event on your own Squarespace site. Get started at eventuallyticketing.com.