How to sell tickets for workshops and sessions using FooEvents

The WooCommerce attributes and variations functionality allows you to easily sell tickets for different workshops, sessions and groups. In this tutorial, we’re going to create an event that includes 5 different workshops, each able to accommodate 50 attendees. Attendees will purchase a ticket for the main event and specify which workshops they would like to attend. There will be 250 tickets available in total.

Setup Workshop Attribute

First we’re going to setup an attribute. With this attribute we can create different variations for each of the workshops that the attendee can choose from:

1. Set the product type to Variable Product
2. Go to the Attributes tab, click Add and specify the name the attribute. We added the word ‘Select’ as this will be displayed alongside the workshop dropdown when the user chooses which workshop they would like to attend. You can simply use ‘Workshop’ as the name as well
3. Specify the different workshops the attendee can choose from
4. Remember to check the Used for variations checkbox
5. Click the Save attributes button

Setup WorkShop Variations

1. Go to the variations tab and select Create variations from all attributes from the Add variations drop down menu. Click Go to create the variations.
2. Go to the first variation and enable Virtual and Manage stock. If you don’t want to manage stock at a workshop level and would rather like to sell a set number of tickets for the main event, then make sure that you don’t enable stock management for each of the variations and rather set the total number of stock on the main Inventory tab
3. Set the ticket price (Note: you can set the same price for each variation or offer different prices for each workshop)
4. Set the number of tickets available for the respective workshop
5. Repeat steps 2-4 for each of the variations and then update or publish the event

End Result

Attendees can purchase a ticket and specify which workshop they would like to attend. Each time a ticket is purchased, the stock for the relevant workshop will be reduced which avoids overbooking. The product page will display the price of the individual workshop as well as the number of stock/spaces available for that particular workshop. The workshop that the attendee selects will also be displayed on their ticket, in the check-ins apps as well as on the attendee CSV export.

You can also use the FooEvents Custom Attendee Fields plugin to add additional custom fields that each attendee can complete when purchasing a ticket. This is useful for acquiring additional information from attendees such as clothing sizes, meal preferences, demographic information, waiver acceptance etc. The options are virtually endless!