On BrightStar, merchandise isn't treated as an afterthought hanging off a ticket. A recording of last month's ceremony, the book your teacher wrote, a shirt from this year's retreat — each of these can stand as its own product, sold with a ticket, or sold to someone who never buys a ticket at all. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A kirtan that filled the room can still have people who only came for the music and want a shirt on the way out, and a retreat that sold out weeks ago still has people who wanted to come, couldn't, and would happily buy the recording instead. Merch lets both of those people buy something without forcing a ticket purchase they don't need.
Setting up size and colour variants
Each product can carry its own set of variants — size, colour, or any option you define for it. A shirt might need small through extra large; a mala might come in a few bead colours; a book might carry no variants at all. BrightStar tracks stock separately for each variant, so a run on Large doesn't quietly use up your count of Medium, and Medium keeps selling long after Large is gone. Each variant can also carry its own photo, so a buyer choosing between black and maroon sees the actual colour they're paying for rather than guessing from one product shot.
Pricing follows the same logic. Most products carry a single price regardless of size, but where a real cost difference exists — an XL that uses more fabric, a hardcover instead of a paperback — you can set pricing per variant instead of forcing every size into the same number.
How fulfilment works
You choose how each product reaches its buyer, and that choice is made per product, not once for the whole shop. A shirt sold at a retreat door might use one method while a recording sold to someone who never attends uses another, sitting in the very same shop:
- 1Collect at the event — appears on the door list with the buyer name
- 2Ship — collects a delivery address at checkout and adds your shipping rate
- 3Digital — delivers a download link on purchase
Selling merch without a ticket
Because merch is its own product, it doesn't require a ticket in the same cart. Your event page gains a shop section where products can be browsed and bought on their own, so someone who lives too far away to attend can still buy the album, and someone deciding between a ticket and just the merch isn't blocked from doing either. Merchandise revenue reports separately from ticket revenue, so when you're checking how an event did, you can see what tickets brought in and what the shop brought in without doing that math by hand afterward.
What this looks like at the door
The three fulfilment choices map onto three situations you'll actually run into. Collect at the event suits the retreat check-in table or the kirtan door — the buyer's name is already on the door list, so there's no packing or shipping label, and no risk of a shirt arriving after the event it was bought for. Ship makes sense for anyone not walking through your door at all — someone backing an album from another city, or a regular attendee who'd rather have a hoodie mailed than carried home from a festival. Digital fits recordings, guided meditations, or e-books where there's nothing physical to hand over — the buyer gets a link the moment payment clears, and there's nothing left for you to fulfil by hand.