Selling tickets and merchandise

Sell tickets for your events, and things like cookbooks or tea towels, from your PTA's own online shop. The money goes straight into your PTA's bank account through Stripe. Upfayre never holds it and takes no commission.

Selling is part of the full plan. Only your committee can set it up.

1. Connect Stripe

Stripe is the payment company that takes the card payments and pays them into your PTA's bank account. You set it up once.

Open Manage PTA in the menu, click Payments, then Start setup.

You'll go to Stripe's own pages. They'll ask about your PTA, the bank account the money should be paid into, and the committee member setting it up: Stripe has to check who's responsible for the account.

It takes about five minutes, and if you stop halfway, Continue setup picks up where you left off. When it's done, the Payments page says Payments are ready. You'll need to have confirmed your email address before you start.

Stripe charges its usual card fee on each sale. You can ask buyers to cover it: tick the option on an event's settings, or on your shop for merchandise.

2. Put an event's tickets on sale

Open the event. In the panel above its tabs, click Set up ticket sales.

Give the ticket a name, such as "Adult" or "Family ticket", a price, and how many are available. Leave Put on sale as Yes — sell now and click Create tickets. A free event can have £0 tickets: people just leave a name and email address, and you still know who's coming.

For a second kind of ticket, such as a child's, click Add ticket type in the same panel.

• Seats shared between ticket types: if adults and children fill the same 100 places, click Seat pool and set the total.
• A family ticket: set People per ticket, so one ticket admits several people.
• Early-bird prices and a sales window (when sales open and close) are optional extras on the same form.

Asking buyers a question

Need a meal choice, a child's class or dietary needs for each ticket? Click Shop in the menu, open the ticket, click Edit, and choose Its own questions under Ticket questions. Questions can be short answers or a choice from a list, and a choice can add to the price. You can also tick Require a name for each ticket. Buyers answer before they pay, and you'll find every answer under Ticket sale responses on the event.

3. Sell merchandise

Click Shop in the menu, then New product. Choose Merchandise, give it a name, price and photo, and set Status to Active. New products start as Draft, so nothing goes on sale by accident. Click Create product.

Merchandise that isn't linked to an event is sold from your PTA's shop page. Things sold at an event, like raffle tickets, can be linked to it under Linked event, and they're then sold next to its tickets.

4. Share the link

Each event with tickets has its own page for buyers. In the event's ticketing panel, Copy copies its link, Public page shows it to you as a parent sees it, and QR code gives you a code to download for posters and newsletters.

Your whole shop, with every event and product on sale, has a link too. It's shown under Your public shop on the Shop page. The Short and Pretty buttons switch between a short link and one with your PTA's name in it. Both work.

Parents don't need an account to buy. What they see is in Buying tickets.

Orders and refunds

Click Orders in the event's ticketing panel for that event's orders, or on the Shop page for everything. Open an order to see who bought what and when.

To refund a whole order, click Refund on the order. The money goes back to the buyer's card and the tickets stop working. To refund only some of the tickets, tick them under Cancel some tickets. Refunds can't be undone.

Please refund from Upfayre rather than from the Stripe dashboard, so that the tickets are cancelled and the places go back on sale.