03 — Add-ons and upgrades
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What it is
Two ways to sell something alongside a ticket. They look similar on the page and behave completely differently at the door, so the choice matters.
| Upgrade | Add-on | |
|---|---|---|
| Belongs to | One ticket | The order |
| Examples | Express entry, a gold wristband, a seated table, a meal | Drink voucher, parking, a merch pickup |
| At the door | Appears on the ticket when it is scanned | Scanned separately, whenever it is used |
| Used up | When the guest walks in | When the guest hands it over |
The short version: an upgrade changes what a ticket is worth. An add-on is a thing the guest redeems.
Which one do I want?
Ask when it gets used.
At the moment they walk in, once → upgrade. Express entry, a wristband, a better seat. Your door staff see it on screen the moment they scan the ticket, and it is marked used automatically. There is nothing separate for the guest to find.
Later, or more than once, or somewhere else → add-on. A drink voucher goes to the bar. Parking goes to whoever is on the gate. A merch pickup goes to a table at the back. Each gets its own code and is scanned at the moment it is used — possibly hours after the guest arrived, possibly by someone who never saw their ticket.
Two drinks means two add-ons, each scanned once. Not one add-on scanned twice.
What you control
| Setting | Applies to | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Name, description, price | Both | |
| How many | Both | Leave empty for unlimited. |
| Maximum per order | Both | Caps a single purchase. |
| Maximum per ticket | Upgrades | "At most one wristband per ticket." |
| Which tiers it applies to | Upgrades | All of them, or only the ones you pick. |
Applying an upgrade to some tiers only
An upgrade can be offered against every tier or only against particular ones — so Backstage can be available on VIP tickets and invisible to General Admission. Your buyer picks how many of their tickets get it; we attach them to the tickets in that tier.
Add-ons have no such setting, because they do not belong to a ticket.
How it behaves
At the door
When a ticket is scanned, its upgrades are listed on the result. Your door staff see "Express Entry" and "Gold wristband" at the moment they admit the guest, and both are marked used right then.
When an add-on is scanned, the screen goes blue rather than green. Blue means hand this over — not let this person in. Nobody is admitted by a drink voucher, and it is deliberately never counted in your attendance figures.
If an add-on has already been used, the screen goes red and says so.
Two bars cannot both honour the same voucher. If the same code is scanned in two places at the same moment, exactly one of them is told to hand it over.
Names and prices are frozen at purchase
Rename a drink voucher or change its price and existing ones keep what they were bought as. What a guest paid for is what their receipt and their code say, whatever you do to the product afterwards.
Codes last forever
Every code that has ever been issued keeps working, including ones from before we changed how codes are generated. A guest who kept a PDF from months ago can still redeem it.
Good to know
An add-on can be sold without a ticket. Somebody can buy parking on its own if you let them.
Upgrades do not have their own QR code. They live on the ticket. If a guest asks where their wristband code is, the answer is that there isn't one — it is on the ticket and the door will see it.
Check your bar reconciles. Every redeemed add-on records when it was used, by whom, and on which device. That is the number to compare against what your bar actually poured.
Sold-out add-ons behave like sold-out tiers. Set a quantity and it stops being offered when it runs out.
If a card is declined, add-ons go back on sale along with the tickets — the whole cart is released together.