Part 1 | Best website builder for maker-led in-person workshops: bookings, ticketing, and deposits

If you're just joining us, welcome to Part 1 of our 4 part series! If you'd like to catch up and meet the Studio owner we're finding a new platform for, head over to the introduction here. This part goes deep on one piece: tickets, private bookings, and deposits.

Our studio owner's workshop signups were showing "pending" instead of confirmed, and every private booking meant an email back and forth, an invoice through her bank, and a wire for the deposit.

That's what happens when tickets, bookings, and deposits aren't built into the platform you're already using. None of that has to be your day to day! I found that some of these four platforms genuinely solve for it natively, while the rest still leave you patching things together app by app. 

Square treats ticketed events as a real item type, not something bolted on after the fact. Set up a workshop as an Event and Square pulls in the date, time, and location fields for you. Want a Kids ticket and an Adults ticket at different prices? That's the same variant system Square already uses for a t-shirt's size or color, so there's nothing new to learn. Each time slot gets its own capacity too, so your 11am class and your 2pm class don't share one pool. Deposits run through Square Invoices, which is already part of what you're paying for, no extra app, no extra fee.

A couple of real limits are worth knowing before you rebuild your whole website around this, though. Square Online won't let someone buy a Kids ticket and an Adult ticket in the same checkout, so a parent's stuck running two transactions instead of one. And every workshop buyer gets the same plain order-confirmation email as someone buying a mug off your site, there's no automatic per-item message unless you add on something like SendOwl, another $39 a month, to handle it.

Wix Bookings might genuinely be the best native fit for a workshop-and-class + ecommerce business of the four, and I didn't expect to say that going in. It's its own dedicated system, not something haphazardly joined on Wix: you set up a service, an Appointment, a Class, or a Course, then schedule as many sessions as you want off the Booking Calendar, each one with its own date, time, staff member, and capacity.

Here's the part that actually sold me: you can charge the full amount online, the full amount in person, or a deposit online with the rest due when they show up, all built in, no manual invoicing required. Your regulars get real options too, Packages for a set number of sessions at a flat price, or Memberships for ongoing access.

It's not perfect of course (but we're not looking for perfection, remember?). No-show fees don't apply to free services or subscription courses. Customers can join a waitlist even for a day you haven't scheduled anything, worth testing (as you should with every platform) and making sure it is clear for your customers. We'll get into pricing more deeply in Part 5, but, Bookings needs at least the $29/month Core plan, it's not available on Wix's free or Light tiers.

Shopify, on the other hand, just doesn't have any of this natively. Shopify's own blog even says so: you need a third-party app for tickets and a different one for bookings. For tickets, that's something like Event Ticketing, which hands you tickets that show up right in the order confirmation and get scanned at the door through Shopify POS. For bookings, Shopify's own roundup names nine App Store options, BookX, Tipo, Meety, and Appointo among them, running roughly $5 to $40 a month, and several of them do let you collect a deposit.

None of this means Shopify can't do it, it clearly can, with the right app installed. But how good it is, whether someone can buy two ticket types in one cart, whether confirmations go out automatically, whether capacity pools correctly, comes down entirely to which app you pick and pay for in addition to the Shopify subscription you're already paying for. 

And lastly, Squarespace, splits this into two different products. For a simple, capped workshop, Service Products handles it natively: set a capacity, add your ticket types as product variants, and Squarespace fires off the confirmation email automatically. It's much closer to how Square handles a workshop than to Shopify's app-required approach.

But the second you need something scheduled at a specific time, something recurring, or a deposit, you're pushed over to Acuity Scheduling. Squarespace owns Acuity, but bills it as a totally separate subscription from your website plan. Acuity's Starter tier is $20 a month and gets you a bookable calendar with client self-scheduling. Deposits are native there too, either a flat dollar amount or a percentage, but if you want packages or memberships, the closest thing Acuity has to Wix's tools for regulars, you're bumped up to the $34/month Standard tier (Note, that's more than Squarespace's Basic and Core pricing). Either way, you're adding anywhere $20 to $34 a month on top of your Squarespace bill.

So if tickets, bookings, and deposits are the thing keeping you up at night, Wix and Square are genuinely the two built for that job. Squarespace can cover a simple ticketed class just fine, but the second you need deposits or recurring scheduling, you're paying Acuity on top. Shopify leaves you building the whole thing yourself, maintaining app on top of apps. 

Next up: loyalty programs and email. How do you keep up with your current customers, future customers, and lapsed customers. This is also where additional  cost differences show up: two of these platforms bundle loyalty and email right into what you're already paying, and two of them ask you to pay yet another subscription for it. This is worth a read if you're already paying for something like Mailchimp, or if rewarding your most loyal customers is something you've been meaning to start.