Coupons and access gates

Where: Registration → Registration Options

Who can register, when, and what they pay.

Free Registration

Makes entry free.

Free entry and revenue are not opposites. You can still sell merchandise during signup and offer upgrades afterwards — a very effective combination, because free entry maximises the number of people in your event and merchandise earns from the subset who want it.

If entry is free for a period only, use Free Registration Ends rather than switching this off manually on the day.

Early Registration

Opens the form before the registration start date.

This is the soft-launch tool. Use it to let a mailing list, sponsors or a partner club in ahead of the public announcement.

Early registrants are real participants

Anyone who registers during the early window is a genuine participant, not test data. They appear in your counts, receive your emails and expect the event to happen. This is not a testing mechanism — that is Re-Registration, below.

Re-Registration

Allows the same account to register more than once.

It exists so you can replay the entire signup flow with your own account while testing — form, payment, email, participant record — without creating a new account each time.

Set this back to Disallow before launch

Left on during a live event, it lets participants register repeatedly, producing duplicate entries, duplicate charges and a participant list you will have to clean by hand. Turn it off as part of your launch checklist.

Coupons

Discount codes are managed in Rewards → Coupon Manager, and participants enter them during registration.

Each coupon controls:

• Its code and the discount it applies
• Which items or entries it applies to
• Number of uses — total, or per participant
• An expiry date
• Optionally, a requirement that the person took part in a previous event

That last one is how returning-participant discounts work: the coupon only applies to people who were in your earlier event, checked automatically.

→ Rewards and merchandise

Referral codes and coupon codes are different

Both are codes participants type in, and they are easy to confuse.

• A coupon code changes what someone pays.
• A referral code records who referred them, and changes nothing about the price.

If you are running a refer-a-friend campaign, you want referral codes. If you are running a discount, you want coupons. Using one for the other produces reporting that looks right and is not.

A sensible launch sequence

1. Re-Registration on, test the whole flow repeatedly.
2. Delete your test registrations.
3. Re-Registration off.
4. Early Registration on, let your list in.
5. Registration Opens date arrives; the public gets in.
6. Early Registration off — it no longer does anything, and leaving it on invites confusion later.