A guide for anyone who teaches
Selling seats in your classes on Shopify
How a pottery studio, a cooking school, or a bakery with a Tuesday night class sells seats through its own store: dates on the product page with seats left, the normal checkout, a reminder the day before, and a roster to check people in at the door. Step by step, using Still Works Classes.
A seat in a class is a product with a date and a limit. Shopify handles the product and the checkout well. What it does not know is that Tuesday's wheel-throwing class has six wheels, that the Saturday bread class closes a day ahead so you can buy flour, or who is standing at the door. Still Works Classes adds those parts and leaves the selling to your store, so seats show up as ordinary orders and the money arrives the way it does now.
Before you open the app, decide four things
| Decision | What it means | A typical answer |
|---|---|---|
| How many seats | The number you can teach at once. Each date can have its own number later. | Six wheels, twelve at the bench |
| When sales stop | How many hours before the start the date stops selling, so you can prepare. | 24 hours |
| Until when guests may cancel | Inside this window a guest can cancel from their own account, and you are emailed which order to refund. | 48 hours before |
| What guests need to know | Where to go, what to bring, and what you provide. It goes into the confirmation and the reminder. | Wear clothes you can get clay on. Aprons provided. |
1. Make the product
In Shopify, make one product for the class the way you would for anything you sell: a title, photos, a description, and the price of a seat. If the price differs by day, say a weekend price, give the product a variant for each price. You will tell the app which one sells on which weekday.
2. Add the class in the app
Install Still Works Classes from the Shopify App Store and open it from Apps in your admin. The menu has five items: Today, Guests, Classes, Set up, and Settings.
Open Classes, choose the product, and fill in the class: the class name, seats per class, length in minutes, where it happens, a host if there is one, what to bring, what is provided, and anything else for the emails. There is room for one question to ask at checkout, like an allergy or a companion's name, and it shows on the roster next to the guest. Set when sales stop and until when guests may cancel.
3. Put dates on it
On the class's own page, Add dates: a weekday and a start time repeated for a number of weeks or months, or a list of single dates, one per line. Every date can be changed on its own afterward: more or fewer seats, a note for guests, a new time, or cancelled. Moving or cancelling a date emails everyone booked on it, and a cancellation also emails you the list of orders to refund.
Under Set up, Calendar closes whole days, such as a holiday or the week the kiln is being repaired. Closing a day cancels its classes and tells the guests. If you already use Still Works Standing Orders, Set up, Import and export copies your locations and closed days across.
4. What guests see on your store
On the class's product page, guests pick a date from a list that shows only dates still selling. Full dates are marked, and a guest can leave an email to be told if a seat opens. They check out through your normal checkout. If the dates are not showing, Set up, Overview has a link that switches the app's block on in your theme editor.
After buying, the guest gets a confirmation with where to go and what to bring, and a reminder the day before. From their account on your store they can add the class to their calendar, move their seat to another date of the same class, or cancel inside your window.
5. At the door
Open Today for the roster of each class: every guest, their seats, and their answer to your question. Print the roster or download it as a file. Check people in as they arrive, or mark everyone checked in once the room is full. Someone who never came is marked a no-show. Checking in closes the order in Shopify without sending the guest a shipping email.
Each morning the app emails you tomorrow's classes and who is coming. Guests finds anyone by name or email, with every class they have booked and a note you can keep about them.
6. The money
Seats are paid through your store's checkout like any other product, so Still Works Classes never charges anyone and never touches a refund. When a guest cancels inside your window, or you cancel a date, you get an email saying which orders to refund, and you refund them in Shopify as usual. The app takes no share of your sales and has no per-seat fee on any plan. The plans are flat monthly prices listed in the App Store, and the smallest is free.
Where to go from here
The Still Works Classes page has the plain description of what the app does and does not do. If something in this guide does not match what you see, email the studio and it gets fixed the same business day.