Pricing a pumpkin patch so the quiet weekdays pay for themselves

Why price the slot rather than the day?

Because the slot is what a visitor buys and what your gate has to absorb. A busy Saturday eleven o clock and a wet Tuesday two o clock cost you roughly the same to run and are worth very different amounts, and on bindro each is a session with its own inventory, so pricing them differently is a matter of publishing the right entry types.

The mechanism is plain: an entry type is a name and a price, the checkout offers the types available for the session, and the price is derived on the server every time an order is quoted and again when it is confirmed. A stale page cannot buy yesterday price, which matters more than it sounds when your listing has been open in somebody browser tab since September.

What belongs in the entry price and what belongs in an add-on?

Put in the entry price everything every visitor gets: the gate, the maze, the play area. Put in add-ons the things some visitors buy and that you have a limited number of — hayride seats, pick-your-own bags, parking. Add-on variants carry their own stock and it moves inside the same transaction that takes the money, so you cannot oversell forty seats to forty-five families.

The rule of thumb that keeps the checkout honest: if you would ever have to say no to somebody who already paid, it needs to be an add-on with stock rather than a line in the description.

• Entry price: admission, the maze, the play barn — everything nobody can be turned away from.
• Add-on with stock: hayride seats, pick-your-own bags, parking spaces, a pumpkin included in the price.
• Neither: anything priced by weight, which bindro cannot do at all.
• Comp entries: under-threes and press, issued rather than sold.

How do I quote a school visit or a birthday party?

With a group rate on the entry type. Set a group price each and the party size it starts at — "twelve or more pay less" — and a booking that reaches that size is priced at the lower figure, worked out on the server rather than in the page. It applies itself, so the teacher books at the right price without ringing you.

Two older controls still work and are sometimes better: a separate entry type at the party price, or a promo code for that one booking. A promo code keeps the price off your public page while still letting a school book itself, which is what you want for a one-off rate you do not intend to publish.

Whichever you use, remember the roster. A party of twelve is twelve places that each need a name before the gate will admit them, and the teacher who books it is the person who has to fill them in. Say so in the email you send with the code.

Can I sell a season pass or a gift for the autumn?

A season pass, no — this vertical does not resolve it, so a product that admits all October cannot be sold. Publishing one as an ordinary entry type would be worse than not offering it, because nothing would stop the same code being scanned at every session and nothing would count it against a slot.

A gift card, yes, and it is the closest real thing. It is stored value on your farm, bought on its own page and redeemed at checkout like any other tender: the sale is still the full price, you are credited all of it, and the fee is charged as it would be on a card. Two things to know — an unredeemed card cannot be paid out to you until somebody spends it, and only the code HMAC is stored, so nobody can read a code back out of the console.

What does the platform take, and what does the tax do?

The platform fee is a percentage plus a fixed amount per paid entry, and free visits cost nothing. You choose whether it comes out of your side, is added to the visitor side, or is split; the fee itself does not change with that choice.

Sales tax is different and it needs a moment of attention. You set a rate per visit, it is added on top of the price US-style, and it never counts towards the platform fee. But the tax collected is held on a remittance account, is not part of your payout, and nothing is filed with any state on your behalf. Price with that in mind and keep your filing exactly where it is today.