Sell every seat at the bench.
Ticketed pottery, craft and cooking workshops on your own branded site. Take payment up front, cap the class and fill the waitlist automatically.
Paid workshops on any flat plan — 0% platform fee, your brand, your payments.
A workshop is a date, not a timetable
A one-off runs as an event: its own date, its own cap, its own listing, and its own page people can be sent straight to. It does not need to belong to a repeating weekly schedule to exist, and running the same workshop again in a month is a new date rather than a new product.
Paid in full, or a deposit, before the seat exists
Payment comes first and the place is created afterwards, so the seats you have sold and the seats you have are the same number.
A workshop can also take a deposit — a fixed amount or a percentage — with the balance due a set number of days before the date. Chocka emails the customer a card link on that date, or you can send one sooner, and the deposit is owed back if they cancel in time. There are still no instalments — one deposit, one balance, not several part payments.
Gift cards people can actually use
A gift card is sold as a balance rather than a ticket to one date, so whoever receives it picks the workshop and the day that suits them. That is what makes it work as a birthday or Christmas present: the person buying it does not have to guess a date the recipient is free, and it is spent at checkout like any other payment.
When it sells out
A bench, a kiln or a kitchen has a hard limit, and once it is reached people join the waitlist instead of booking. If a place frees up the person at the top is emailed an offer with a window to take it, and it passes down the queue if they do not — so a popular date refills itself without you working out whose turn it is.
What Chocka does not do
No instalments — a deposit and its balance, as above, but not three or more part payments. It is the gap most likely to matter here.
No point of sale, retail or stock. Chocka sells places, not materials, so a kiln-fired mug or a bag of clay sold on the day is not something it handles. There is also no member app, no email campaign tools, and no marketplace listing your workshops alongside anyone else’s.
Questions people actually ask
- Can I take a deposit now and the balance on the day?
- Yes — set a fixed amount or a percentage as the deposit, and how many days before the date the balance is due. Chocka emails the customer a card link on that date, or you can send one sooner. There are still no instalments — one deposit, one balance. Tell us what you need.
- Can I sell a gift voucher for a workshop?
- Yes, as a balance rather than a ticket to one date — so the person who receives it picks the workshop and the date that suits them, and spends it at checkout like any other payment.
- How do I stop overselling a bench?
- You set the cap and Chocka enforces it at the point the payment completes rather than in the browser, so two people cannot buy the last place at the same moment. Once it is full, the waitlist takes over.
- Do I need my own Stripe account?
- No, not any more (bank transfer on paid plans). If you take cards, your students pay into your Stripe account rather than ours, so the money is yours from the first second and arrives on your own payout schedule. It is free to open and takes a few minutes.