On-sale day for a 200-capacity room: tiers, pools and holding tickets back

Why is a price ladder better than editing the price?

Because a rung keeps its own history. In bindro an early-bird is a separate ticket tier with its own price, its own window and its own inventory pool, rather than a price column you raise on the day. Two things follow that matter weeks later.

The first is that what somebody paid stays readable on their order after the ladder has moved on, so a refund in six weeks is for the amount they actually paid rather than the current price. The second is that the number of early-birds is a real cap: when the pool is empty, the rung is gone. You are not watching a counter and editing a price at the moment it passes forty.

The gate is on the money path, not in the page. If somebody has your on-sale page open from before the early-bird closed and tries to buy from it, the hold is refused with no order behind it — the checkout hiding a closed rung is a convenience, and the server refusing it is the rule.

How should I structure the tiers for a single show?

Three rungs cover most nights, and the shape is about windows as much as prices.

• Early bird: a real cap — thirty or forty in a 200-capacity room — with a window that closes on a date, so it ends even if it does not sell out.
• Advance: the main tier, open from the on-sale until the doors, sized so that the early-bird pool plus this one plus anything held back equals your legal capacity and no more.
• Door: priced higher, with a window that opens on the day. It is the same pool arithmetic, and it gives the walk-up sale a tier to sell from without you reopening anything.
• Optional held-back tier: a small pool with a window that opens once you know the guest list has settled. This is the substitute for a waitlist, and it has to be planned before the show sells out.
• A pre-ordered merch add-on if the artist has stock — it is charged in the same basket, has its own per-variant stock, and unlike the merch table it is inside the artist's split.

What happens when the show sells out?

It goes off sale, and nobody is queued. There is no waitlist for this vertical: the capability is not declared, so the sold-out page carries no join form and there is no list to promote from when a ticket frees up. That is a real gap against app-first platforms, whose waiting lists are one of their strongest features, and it is why the held-back tier above is worth setting up in advance.

A returned ticket does not go back on sale either, because tickets do not come back: a punter who cannot come hands their ticket on to somebody by name, and the seat moves rather than returning to the pool. From the room's point of view nothing changed — the same number of people are coming — which is exactly right for capacity and no help at all for the people refreshing your page.

What you can do is publish a small held-back release with its own window and tell your mailing list when it opens. It is a real pool with a real cap, so it cannot oversell the room, and it puts the release under your control rather than into an automated queue.

Where should the on-sale actually happen?

On your own site, using the embedded ticket page, with the hosted listing as the link you paste everywhere else. Both are included and both drive the same checkout, so there is one inventory pool and one set of numbers regardless of where somebody bought.

Set expectations about traffic honestly: bindro has no marketplace and sends you no audience. Nobody browses bindro looking for a gig. If discovery is the problem you are trying to solve, an app-first platform with its own listening audience will do more for you than any feature here, and it is worth being clear-eyed about which problem you actually have.

One thing this vertical does not get, which the club-night vertical does, is a generated share card and short link for a show. Shared on social a listing is an ordinary link with an ordinary preview, so put the artwork in the post yourself.

What should I check before the on-sale goes live?

The failures that hurt on an on-sale are structural and cheap to prevent, and they are all about pools and windows.

• Pools sum to the legal capacity of the room and no more — including any pass tier, because a pass does not consume a place at each date it covers.
• Every window has both ends set, and the early-bird closes before the door tier opens rather than overlapping it.
• The show is one event per night if you want to be paid per night: payouts are one per show, two days after its last date.
• The age limit is set if the night is licensed, so the check runs at checkout instead of only at the door.
• A split, if this show has one, is saved against the show rather than left to the house default — and remember it freezes when the payout is scheduled.