Setting up a PTA Shop / Selling Second Hand Uniform on Classlist

You can run a second hand uniform shop or PTA Shop selling other merchandise on Classlist to take orders and payments online.

You can set a specific numbers of each item available to manage your stock, such as:

• Blazer age 9 - 4 available - Price £10
• Tie One Size - 9 available - Price £3
• Jumper 34" - 2 available - Price £5
• Christmas Tea Towel - 37 available - Price £5

To set up your Shop go to Community Events in your Admin area and create a new event.

Event date and details

For your Shop you can decide whether you want to have 

• a long-running event starting soon and lasting for weeks
• a start/end date set far in the future. 
• a shop per term or per year

So long as the end date hasn't passed your shop will be open. This choice will affect where your event shows in the parent calendar. The sooner the start date the higher up the calendar list.

NB: Don't set an RSVP date for a shop as people won't be able to make purchases after an RSVP date has passed. RSVP dates are useful for events where you want to stop selling tickets and finalise your numbers before the event as sales stop on that date.

When the shop is close to it's end date you can either extend the end date or duplicate the event to create the basis for a new shop.

Add tickets 

NB: You can reorder the list anytime, this is useful to keep similar items together. Eg all blazers first followed by all jumpers. Especially important for uniform shops with a very large amount of different items - consider what structure would be the easiest for a parent searching for an item.

Collect Payments

You will be asked to connect to your Stripe account to take card payments. 

If you don't have a Stripe account you will be taken to the Stripe set up process automatically. 

If you do have a Stripe account, you can just enter your Stripe login details and your PTA Shop will be ready to take card payments.

The reasons we recommend Stripe are

• the card payment feature is integrated into our app so parents don't leave the event page to pay.  It is super quick for them to use as we already have their name and email so they literally only type in card details and postcode and they are finished.  
• Please see our article on card payment fees and factor these in especially for lower priced items.

Stock Management

As you get more donations you will want to increase the amount of stock available. Stock will decrease automatically as items are sold through the platform. To keep the numbers straight the quantity field should match all the stock that you have ever had for that item. Quantity = total stock.

When editing the quantity field you will need to click the add button again to save any changes.

Example

• Initially put the number of items of stock available eg 2 dresses. 
• If 3 more dresses are donated and the first 2 have sold, you need to add 3 more so the total quantity is 5.   That is the first 2 dresses plus the next 3 dresses. 
• That is because in total you have had 5 dresses to sell. 
• If you already sold 2 the system takes that into account and will show 3 available (5 total - 2 sold = 3 available).

In other words, every time you add stock you ADD the number of the new items on to the number in the quantity field.

Tip: If this gets confusing for an item, you could delete a ticket and create a new one with the same title. The deleted ticket will not show on the parent side and sales to date for the deleted ticket will still show in the download.  

Information from purchasers

When purchases are made you will be able to see parent name and their associated pupils/classes in the csv download.

If you need to ask additional information you can add questions for the purchaser.

Who to invite to your shop?

We suggest that you invite the whole school as guests so that everyone can see the shop. If you set up more than one shop eg for juniors and seniors separately then you could just invite the relevant year groups and make the shop title clear as to which section of the school it caters for.

You may also want to turn on the public checkout so that new starters can access the shop.

Shop Owners

Aka Event owners, consider adding more than one person to help with the shop, in case someone is away and for continuity if someone leaves.

Publish your Shop

When you publish you can choose if you want to send invites to people or not. For a shop you might want to choose 'publish & invite later' this will not send invites to parents but will put the shop in the event list so people can find it and make purchases as and when they like. 

To promote your shop you could send the invites later or send an announcement letting people know about the shop and how it works.

Booking slots to attend

If you want people to be able to attend in person you can use our SignUp List feature so they can book slots. Add SignUp lists to your event for each date you want to offer time slots.

As parent book a slot you can see that if you View the SignUp list on the admin area Event page.

Parent View

This is how the PTA Shop will look to parents.  

They can find it on the Events page.

If you added a SignUp for time slots it will look like this. Parents simply click to book.