Tickets and payment

Two things control ticketing, and they’re deliberately separate:

• The price is set per event, on the event form. Blank or 0 makes it free.
• How you collect is set once for your whole calendar, in Settings → Organization → Calendar.

There’s one per-event exception: an external ticket link (below), for nights you already sell somewhere like Eventbrite.

Choosing how you collect

Go to Settings → Organization → Calendar. You get two options:

Collect payment in person

Customers reserve a spot online for free; you take the money at the counter. Their registration sits as Unpaid on the roster until you mark it Paid.

This is the default, and it’s the right choice if your event money goes through a till you already trust.

Collect payment online (Shopify)

Customers pay when they register, through your own Shopify checkout — the same cart, the same payment provider, the same order list as a card sale. Sideboard marks them paid for you.

This option is greyed out until your Shopify store is connected. See Shopify setup.

Selling tickets somewhere else

Some events aren’t yours to sell — a regional qualifier ticketed on Melee.gg, a launch party on Eventbrite, a league running its own sign-up page. For those, paste the link into External ticket link on the event form.

Customers still sign up on your calendar, so you keep the roster and the email list. After they sign up, they get a Buy your ticket ↗ button that opens your link in a new tab. Their registration sits as Unpaid until you mark it Paid, exactly like collecting in person — Sideboard can’t see what happens on someone else’s platform.

While an external link is set, that event is never sold through your Shopify checkout, even if your calendar is in Shopify mode. If a ticket product was already published for it, Sideboard takes it down. This is on purpose: the same seat on sale in two places, with the count kept in neither, oversells the night.

Clear the field to go back to your calendar’s normal collection method.

How Shopify ticketing works

Once you’re in Shopify mode, each paid event night becomes a product in your Shopify store, created automatically for the next 60 days and kept in step as you edit the event.

The customer’s path:

1. They pick a night on your calendar and click Register & Pay.
2. Sideboard holds their seat and sends them straight to your Shopify checkout.
3. They pay. The order lands in Shopify like any other sale, and Sideboard flips their registration to Paid within seconds.

Walk-ups through POS. Sell the same ticket product in Shopify POS and Sideboard creates the registration for you — it appears on the roster as Paid with a Shopify badge, even if the night was technically full. Money already moved; the seat is theirs.

Seats. Sideboard publishes the remaining seats as the ticket’s inventory, so “Sold Out” on your storefront means what it says. One nuance worth knowing: an unpaid reservation doesn’t hold Shopify stock. A seat is guaranteed once it’s paid for. This is deliberate — zeroing out the last seat the moment someone starts a checkout would block that person’s own payment.

Events with no capacity set sell without inventory tracking, so they never show as sold out.

Refunds. Refund a ticket in Shopify and Sideboard follows the restock choice you make on the refund screen:

That’s the difference between “they dropped, sell the seat to someone else” and “we comped them after the fact but they’re still playing.”

When online payment isn’t ready

If your calendar is set to collect online but Shopify isn’t in a state where it can sell — not connected, or the connection needs attention — customers see “Online payment isn’t available for this event right now. Please contact the store.” and no half-finished registration is created.

If you see this reported by a customer:

1. Check Settings → Integrations → Shopify — is the store connected, and is there a re-authorization banner waiting?
2. Confirm your Shopify location is set up so inventory can sync.
3. Switch the calendar to Collect payment in person as a stopgap — sign-ups start working again immediately and you take the money at the door.

Free events

Free events skip all of this. No product is created, no checkout happens, and the roster shows a Free badge instead of a payment dropdown — regardless of which collection mode you’re in.

What’s next

• Events on your storefront — listing events on your Shopify site
• Sign-ups and attendees — marking payment on the roster
• Shopify setup — connecting your store
• Shopify day-to-day — how orders and inventory flow

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