Selling Tickets

Sway Tickets is Sway's own ticketing. Buyers check out on the event's Sway page, pay the promoter's Stripe account, and receive a scannable ticket by email. Six screens in the event sidebar cover the whole job, and this page is the map to them.

Two things have to be true before any of those screens can take a single euro, and neither of them lives in this group.

What has to exist first

A promoter page with a working payout account. Sway does not hold your money. Every payment goes to a Stripe account connected to the promoter page, not to the event and not to your user account. One promoter, one account, shared by every event that promoter organises. The indicator that matters is Charges enabled: until it reports yes, checkout fails at the payment step, however finished the rest of your ticketing looks. Full procedure in Connect Payouts.

Sway Tickets turned on for the event. The switch sits on the Main tab of the event's settings and decides whether the event sells through Sway or points at ticketing of your own. With it off, most of the screens below are replaced by a line telling you to enable it. See Event settings.

Set it up in this order

1. Connect Stripe on the promoter page. Open the promoter, go to Settings → Payouts, and finish Stripe's form. Then wait until Charges enabled reports yes. Stripe decides when that happens, and Sway only reports it.
2. Turn on Sway Tickets on the event. Open the event, go to Settings → Main, switch Sway Tickets on, and click Save changes.
3. Choose who gets paid. The event's Payouts tab appears once step 2 is saved. Find the promoter in the table and click Link this promoter. Exactly one promoter per event receives the money.
4. Create at least one ticket type. Nothing can be bought until one exists. See Ticket Types.
5. Add what the campaign needs, in any order: Coupons for discount codes, and Presales for a registration campaign. A presale unlocks a Hidden/Private ticket type, so it can only be built after step 4.
6. Issue comps to guests, artists and press on the Guestlist.
7. Create your scanners before doors open, one per door or per shift. See Scanners.
8. Follow the sales on Orders, which is also where a refund is issued.

Steps 1 to 4 are the minimum for an event that sells. Steps 5 to 7 are optional and can be done while sales are running. Making the event public is a separate decision with its own requirements, covered in Publish an Event.

What still works without Sway Tickets

Turning the switch off does not empty the sidebar. It changes what each screen does.

Who can open each screen

Each of the six is gated by its own permission, granted per event. A screen you have no permission for is greyed out in the sidebar rather than hidden, so the menu looks the same to everybody and the reason is in the tooltip. Viewing and editing are usually two separate permissions: read access opens a screen with its buttons dimmed. See Manage Permissions.

The six screens