Grouping Tickets Into Sections

A retreat with a day pass, three room options, a meal plan and a shuttle option is a lot to take in as one flat list. If every ticket type sits on the page with the same visual weight, a buyer has to read past everything to find the thing they actually came for — the day pass buried between shuttle add-ons and room upgrades. Ticket categories let you group that list into named sections, so the page reads as structure instead of a scroll. You choose the names — admission, packages, accommodation, add-ons, or whatever language your event actually uses — and you choose the order they appear in. The result is closer to how you'd walk someone through the choices in person: first, what are you attending, then what are you adding to it.

BrightStar only shows section headers when there is a genuine multi-section structure — meaning two or more distinct categories. Every ticket, whether you've touched this feature or not, carries a default admission category behind the scenes. Without a rule to guard against it, a simple kirtan night selling nothing but one General Admission ticket would still render a collapsible "Admission" header wrapping that single item — a click added for no clarity gained. Instead, a single category renders as a plain ticket list, and the section headers appear only once a second category exists. You get grouping the moment grouping helps, and not before.

A section is presentation, nothing more. It groups and orders tickets on your event page, but it carries no pricing, no availability, and no rules of its own. Every ticket inside a section keeps its own price, its own quantity available, and its own maximum per order — none of that changes based on which section the ticket sits in. This works because the category is stored as a property of the ticket itself rather than as a separate container holding it. Moving a ticket between sections is therefore a small edit to that ticket, not a rebuild of it, which is why its sales history stays untouched. The same logic makes renaming a section, reordering sections, or reassigning a ticket to a different one safe to do at any point — none of it reaches back to touch anything already purchased.

Because a section carries no pricing or inventory of its own, editing the grouping mid-sale doesn't put anything at risk. If accommodation starts running low a few weeks before your retreat, you can move that section above add-ons so the scarce thing is the first thing a buyer reads, without touching a single price or quantity underneath it. The same applies to renaming a section that turned out to be confusing, or assigning a ticket to a different category once you realize it belongs elsewhere. All of this happens on the manage page, and none of it recreates the ticket or resets what's already sold.