Payments & Payouts

Cart and Guest Checkout

Buyers pick several ticket types, hold their place while they decide, and pay by card without creating an account.

3 min readUpdated 2026-10-01

What's actually sitting in a cart before someone pays

A cart is not just one ticket waiting for one payment. It's a small holding area that can carry several things at once:

Why ticket holds expire instead of lasting forever

A hold that never expired would leave stock locked while your event shows as sold out to everyone still browsing. Picture a busy festival gate, or a retreat that's down to its last few beds — someone adds a ticket, gets pulled away, and never comes back to pay.

What happens when someone pays

Checkout asks for an email address, because that address is how the ticket reaches the buyer. Payment runs through Stripe by card. Buyers move through a short series of steps: review the order, optionally add extras or support, enter their details, and pay.

What fees show up in the total

What a buyer pays is built from a few distinct pieces:

If an event's ticket sales are paused after a buyer adds items to their cart, BrightStar sends them back to the event page so they see the current state. If specific ticket types were disabled or paused after being added, the buyer sees a message that one or more tickets are no longer available and is asked to return to the event page and reselect. If a buyer reports a ticket disappearing partway through checkout, check whether that ticket type was paused or disabled while they were mid-purchase.

Common questions

Do buyers need an account to buy tickets on BrightStar?

No. BrightStar supports guest checkout: a buyer can add tickets, apply a discount code, and pay by card without creating an account. Checkout asks for an email address, and the ticket is delivered to that address.

Can someone buy several different ticket types in one order?

Yes. A BrightStar cart holds multiple ticket types at once, so a buyer can take two general admission tickets, a supporter ticket and an add-on in a single order.

Add-ons can sit in the same cart as tickets. They appear grouped separately from admission on the review step, and the buyer can add them there before continuing.

How long does BrightStar hold tickets in a cart?

When items in a BrightStar cart have a hold, the cart reports when the earliest hold expires, and the buyer sees a countdown timer during checkout. When the time runs out, the cart is reloaded and expired items are cleared.

What fees does a buyer pay on BrightStar?

On BrightStar, a buyer pays the ticket total, any custom fee the organizer has added, a platform fee charged per ticket, and payment processing of 3.05% plus $0.40 charged once per order. The platform fee depends on the plan chosen for the event: nothing on the free Seva plan, $0.89 plus 1.85% per ticket on Elevate, and $1.79 plus 3.7% per ticket on Amplify.

Processing is charged once for the whole order no matter how many tickets it contains. The platform fee scales with the number of tickets. Whether the buyer or the organizer absorbs these fees is a per-event setting, so the same rates can produce a different-looking checkout depending on how the organizer configured it.

Are free tickets charged any fees on BrightStar?

No. On BrightStar, a cart totalling nothing skips all fees, with no platform fee and no processing fee. The buyer confirms the order without entering card details.

A free order still moves through the same checkout steps as a paid one, ending in a confirmation page instead of a card payment.

Payment Methods & Security

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Fee Calculation Engine

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Connecting Stripe to Get Paid

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