A guide for pottery studios

How to sell pottery classes on Shopify

A pottery studio already sells mugs, gift cards and maybe clay through Shopify. Classes can go through the same store and the same checkout. This guide covers how to sell pottery classes on Shopify: how to set up the products, how to count seats when the limit is the number of wheels, and how to handle date nights, gift cards and the door. Everything up to the last part works in plain Shopify. The last part shows how Still Works Class Booking handles the dates, seats and emails.

1. Decide what you are selling

Before you make a single product, write down each kind of class you teach and what limits it. In a pottery studio the limit is rarely the room. It is wheels, bench space, or how many people one teacher can help center clay at once.

Class	What limits it	What to tell guests
Intro to the wheel	The number of wheels	Clothes that can get muddy, short nails, hair tied back
Handbuilding	Seats at the bench	Clay and tools provided
Date night	Wheels, sold in pairs	Book two seats, one per person
Kids clay	Kids per teacher	Who picks up, and any allergies

Also decide how finished pieces come home. Most studios fire and glaze after class, so guests come back later to collect. Say that in the product description and in every email, so nobody expects to leave with a mug.

2. Set up the class in plain Shopify

Go to Products and choose Add product. Give it a plain title like "Intro to the Wheel", good photos of hands in clay, and a description that answers what, how long, and what is included.
Under Shipping, untick "This is a physical product", so checkout does not ask for a shipping address.
Add a variant for each date, named the same way every time, like "Thu Oct 22, 6 pm".
On each date variant, turn on Track quantity, set the quantity to your wheel count, and leave Continue selling when out of stock off. When the wheels are gone, the date is sold out.
Set the product type to "Class" and add it to a "Classes" collection, so it has its own page in your menu.

The weak spots of this setup are dates. Old dates stay for sale until you remove them, Shopify cannot stop sales the day before, and there is no reminder or roster. Our guides on past class dates and printing a roster cover the hand-run workarounds.

3. Date nights, gift cards and private parties

Date nights. Price the product per person, and say "Book 2 seats for a couple" right above the button. The quantity box then does the work. If you would rather sell a pair, make the variant "Pair" and set the seats to half the wheels.

Gift cards. Shopify gift cards are a product type of their own, under Products, Gift cards. A gift card works at checkout on a class seat like on anything else, so "a pottery class" can be a gift card in a set amount with a note about which classes it covers.

Private parties. Keep them off the public calendar. Agree the date by email, then send a draft order from Orders, Drafts with the number of seats, so the group pays through your store.

4. The week of the class

The day before, email everyone booked with the time, the address, what to wear, and when pieces will be ready.
Stop sales the evening before by setting the date's quantity to 0, so you can wedge enough clay.
Print a list of guests from your orders and check them in at the door.
After class, take the date down and note who came, for when pieces are ready.

The same steps in Still Works Class Booking

Still Works Class Booking keeps your one product per class and takes the dates off your hands. Under Classes, choose the product and fill in the class: seats per class (your wheel count), length, where, the teacher as host, "What to bring", "What's provided", and "Anything else for the emails", which is the place for when fired pieces are ready. Set "Stop selling seats this many hours before the start", and how long before a class guests may cancel. When you add the class, the app turns off shipping on the product for you.

Then Add dates: every week on the days you tick, once a month like the first Friday, or a list of single dates. Each date keeps its own seats, so a smaller Sunday class is one change. If weekend seats cost more, give the product a variant for each price and set the Price tiers by weekday. Under Set up, Calendar closes a day, or the week the kiln is being repaired, and tells everyone booked.

On the product page, guests pick a date with seats left, and full dates take a waiting list. A party of two buys two seats on one date. You can ask one question at checkout, such as a companion's name or "Any clay allergies?", and the answer lands on the roster. Guests get a confirmation and a reminder the day before. On Today you print the roster, check people in, and add a private-party guest or a counter sale by hand.

One honest limit: each seat is for one date. A four-week wheel course is best sold as its first night, with the other nights listed in "Anything else for the emails", and the reminder only goes out before that first night. The free plan covers up to 4 class dates a month, with no per-seat fee on any plan. The app is on the Shopify App Store.

Where to go from here

The Still Works Class Booking page has the plain description of what the app does and does not do. If something here does not match what you see, email the studio and it gets fixed the same business day.