Someone registered for the Saturday session of your retreat and now the only day that works for them is Sunday. Or they bought the general kirtan ticket and, after seeing who else is coming, they want the seat with the shared meal included. In both cases, refunding the person and asking them to buy again is the wrong tool. You pay the processing fee twice on the same attendee, the seat goes back into general sale while you sort it out, and the attendee now has a free moment to wonder whether they want to come at all. An exchange or an upgrade skips all of that. It moves the ticket instead of unwinding the sale.
What's the difference between an exchange and an upgrade?
An exchange moves an attendee to a different date or session of the same offering — the Saturday sound bath instead of the Sunday one, week two of the retreat instead of week one. An upgrade moves them to a better ticket type within the same event — a higher tier, a seat that includes something the base ticket doesn't, an add-on they decided partway through that they wanted after all. Both work the same way underneath: they start from the ticket the attendee already holds rather than from a brand-new purchase. That matters at a door or a check-in table, because it means there is still one order with one history, not a cancelled ticket and a separate new one that someone has to match up by hand.
How do you turn on exchange for an event
Exchange lives in the same self-serve panel as refund, credit, and transfer, on a per-event basis. To make it available to attendees:
- 1Open the self-serve settings for the specific event.
- 2Turn on exchange for that event — it is off by default, the same as the other three options.
- 3Set a deadline, in days before the event, after which exchanges stop.
- 4Leave it off if you would rather see each request yourself before anything is changed.
Why does the original order stay intact?
Because an exchange or upgrade is recorded against the ticket the attendee already bought, you are not creating a second transaction to reconcile against the first. That is the same reason it avoids the double processing fee a refund-and-rebuy causes — there is only ever one purchase to process, even though what it entitles the attendee to has changed. It also means the seat never goes back on general sale in between, which matters when a session is close to full: you are not gambling that the same person rebuys before someone else takes the spot.
What happens if you leave exchange off?
Nothing happens automatically, which is the point. An attendee who wants to move dates or upgrade still reaches you — the request just arrives as something for you to look at and decide on, case by case, instead of being processed the moment they ask. That is a reasonable choice for a smaller gathering where you want to know about every change, or for an event where the ticket types aren't simple enough to swap without a conversation first.