Case study · SA Art Fair
An art school that takes bookings like a shop.
SA Art Fair sells original artwork and runs studio classes, workshops and full terms. Two very different things to sell, one Shopify store, and a booking flow that had to survive both.
Cape Town · live and running
The brief
Sell seats and canvases from the same store.
Classes are not products. A seat has a date, a time, a capacity, an age range and a person attending it — and a term booking is a dozen of those at once. Off-the-shelf booking apps either sit outside the checkout or cannot express a term at all. We built the booking layer into the store instead.
What we built
The booking system, feature by feature.
Three ways to book
One session, several hand-picked dates, or a full term — chosen with a segmented control on the product page. Multi-session bookings share a booking group so they stay one order.
Term pricing that argues for itself
When the sessions someone picked cost more than the full term, the widget says so and offers the switch. The upsell is arithmetic, not a popup.
Per-seat attendee details
Book three seats and you get three name fields. The studio knows who is walking in, not just how many.
Waitlists on sold-out dates
A full session captures an email instead of losing the visitor, and the studio can notify the list when a seat frees up.
Calendar invite on checkout
The booking generates a calendar file the moment it is held, so the class lands in the attendee's diary rather than their inbox.
One admin for the studio
Bookings grouped by order, cancellation policy edited from a settings tab, waitlist notifications, and a live view of every class.
Beyond the booking
The rest of the store came with it.
Also shipped
Wishlist synced across devices
Display currency switching — ZAR, USD, EUR, GBP
Shop by colour, and an Art under R5 000 collection that maintains itself
Artist directory with search, medium and sort filters
A 14-question art personality quiz that captures leads
Floating WhatsApp contact
Questions
What people ask about this build.
Can I get this on my own store?
Yes. The booking system installs onto an existing Shopify store from R4,500 once-off plus R850 a month. If you need the store as well, a full build with booking runs R18,000 to R28,000.
Does it work for things other than art classes?
The logic is seats against dates with capacity, so it fits anything that sells time — yoga, padel courts, salons, surf schools, tattoo studios, clinics. Art classes were simply the hardest version to build first.
Do payments go through my checkout?
Yes. Bookings become line items in your own Shopify cart, so deposits and payments settle through the payment provider you already use. There is no second checkout to reconcile.
How long does an install take?
Three to five working days on an existing store. A full store build with the booking system runs two to three weeks.